Open Trade Equity (OTE)

You buy a stock. That stock goes up in price. Now you're sitting on a paper profit. You don't have the money yet...you have to sell the stock to realize the gain. But as things sit now, your net worth has increased based on the rising stock price. That increase (the gain in the value of your portfolio because of the increase in the value of your holdings) represents your open trade equity.

You buy 200 shares of XOM at $75 a share. You now hold $15,000 worth of XOM stock. Shares go up in price to $80. Your holdings are now worth $16,000. You've made a paper profit of $1,000. Or, another way to say it: your OTE is now $1,000.

The figure represents the unrealized gains (or unrealized losses, if you have a negative value for your OTE) of your open positions (hence the "open trade" part of the name).