# What do you track for your stocks/portfolio?



## Young&Ambitious (Aug 11, 2010)

I track capital contributed, buy/sell, dividend vs capital gains(losses), return on capital. 

I have been thinking about throwing in a bar or line chart showing capital contributed, realized returns, and market value of the whole portfolio and then throwing in a line tracking the S&P 500 so I can compare my return to that of the standby plan. Adding this sounds like it has a PITA factor to it though.

What do you guys do?


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## HaroldCrump (Jun 10, 2009)

Essentially, you need 4 - 5 pieces of data - the date of buy, the price paid, the current value, and distributions/dividends (if any)
Once you get these into Excel, the rest is magic.
You can derive all kinds of performance metrics (total return, annualized return, IRR, etc.), all kinds of fancy charts, bars, and graphs.
It depends on how much time you have and how much you like admiring your profits (or weeping over your losses).


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## Toronto.gal (Jan 8, 2010)

HaroldCrump said:


> 1. It depends on how much time you have
> 2. how much you like admiring your profits (or weeping over your losses).


1. As we say, 'time is precious', ie: it needs to be productive [and fun].

- Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them. ~Dion Boucicault
- Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted time. ~T. S. Elliot

2. Neither one.... :biggrin: until quarter/year-end that is. :encouragement:


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## Young&Ambitious (Aug 11, 2010)

Yeah there isn't much value-add to making a fancy chart (but it would like pretty!) :rolleyes2:

So then to add to that: I need to compare my return against some standard (S&P 60 or 500 or etcetc). I know one site I was looking at recently did a "if you had put $10,000 in Index X at deposit time X you would have $X at today" and compare that to the return on their fund. I could do that...but it wouldn't account for added contributions (or withdrawals), so it sounds like I need to track the change in value of a index etf since my portfolio inception and maybe every 6 months thereafter to get an idea. But then to also track dividends, return of capital, etcetc seems like it would be tedious. Surely there's an easy source for this people tend to refer to? Maybe I shouldn't think so much on Fridays...brain is tired


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

Young&Ambitious said:


> Yeah there isn't much value-add to making a fancy chart (but it would like pretty!)



perhaps you could just do a net worth study once a year ?

that's all i do. To be honest less than once a year. I prefer once a decade.

i have 2 sealed accounts with no withdrawals, ie dividends & gains are all reinvested. One is fairly typical of my across-the-board total investments, so it serves as a benchmark. This account tells its own story, so far i haven't seen any use for additional record-keeping esp since i don't want to weep or admire.

i do of course keep elaborate capital gains/losses records, but the topic here is portfolio tracking i believe, not gain/loss reporting.

my other accounts are higgledypiggledy, with dividends or gains being grabbed out & spent or else sent to HISA or else reinvested according to the needs of the week. 

i don't know of any reason to array the numbers for these accounts so i don't. Perhaps i'm missing something important ? before i came to this forum, i never knew anybody who tracked their portf with elaborate measurements ...


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## GoldStone (Mar 6, 2011)

Y&A, learn to use XIRR function in Excel. It calculates the Internal Rate of Return of your portfolio. See this tutorial:

http://www.financialwebring.org/gummy-stuff/xirr.htm

The key point to remember about XIRR:

You have to treat your portfolio as a block box. You only track the external inflows or outflows of funds (contributions and withdrawals). You don't have to track any internal movements (trades, dividends, etc).

To figure out how well you are doing, compare your IRR to the total return of an appropriate index (or a blend of indexes if you own multiple asset classes). You can use Norm Rothery's Asset Mixer to calculate blended index returns:

http://www.ndir.com/cgi-bin/downside_adv.cgi

Using IRR to benchmark your portfolio is a lot simpler than it sounds.


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## lonewolf (Jun 12, 2012)

I develope a trading sytem based on statistics that gives me an edge through data mining. Then the system is not used untill it is tested to reduce the odds that the data mining was not a fluke.

When using the system statistics should be kept incase they indicate the data mining did not really give one an edge in the market & should be compared to the statistcs that were mined.

If trading stats are calculated, kept, are easy to view & understand that determine percentage of wins, average loss, average gain, largest gain, largest loss, length of time held, speed of movement or what ever you think would aid you. They might even help an investor stick to thier method if they know the precise odds.

Then I can go to the option market & often use options to give my investment a positive curvature based on the above info, i.e., If I can buy a deep in the money option that has little or no premium I will consider buying it. Without the statistics I would not have the map to proceed.


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## GoldStone (Mar 6, 2011)

What, planetary alignment is not important any more?


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## lonewolf (Jun 12, 2012)

Hi, goldstone


Might want to be carefull thinking a certain alignment is not important anymore. Might get a repeat of 1929 when the market did a false breakout & peaked past Jupitor @ 14 degrees in taurus.


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## Young&Ambitious (Aug 11, 2010)

So lonewolf compares his return to historical planetary events? I'd bet there is a planetary etf out there


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## QUANTify-IT (Oct 1, 2012)

I did a quick word search to ensure I hadn't missed it.

The word I searched for was RISK.

I track risk and not just the mildly useful VaR calcs, I mean actual quantifiable and calculable risk, where I know them. 

We track the performance risk-ratios (Sharpe, Sortino, Calmar) as well as tracking max draw-down.

Similar to lonewolf, we run statistical trading algo's across various securities in an attempt to gain an exploitable edge while limiting risk.

My moto has always been to take care of the down-side risk and the up-side will take care of itself almost naturally. Most of our time is spent on risk management!


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## Synergy (Mar 18, 2013)

Does anyone know if there's an application that could track and organize individual stock holding by sector (financial, energy, etc.) and geography (US INT, CAN, etc.)? Something like google finance would be great if it could simply breakdown your allocations into a percentage, pie chart, etc. Has anyone tried to do this using an excel spreadsheet?


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## Spudd (Oct 11, 2011)

In Excel you can easily do it manually if you make a sheet like this:

PM consumer US $100
PG consumer US $130
CM financial CA $80
COS energy CA $91

Then you create a pivot table to summarize by whichever column (sector or geography), and sum up the dollar values. You can create a pie chart based on the pivot table and there you are. 

If you want something more automatic, I hear the Morningstar X-ray is similar to what you're looking for, but I think it's only got American data.


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## Synergy (Mar 18, 2013)

Thanks Spudd, I think I'll give the spreadsheet a try. That way it's fully customizable to my liking and free.


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## Synergy (Mar 18, 2013)

Do you know if there's a way to add a percent function along with the total sum amounts? So far I've used Sector as my row field and market value (sum) as my data field. It works great but it would be nice to add a percentage next to the sum.

Energy - $25,000.00, 15%
Financial - $ etc...


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## the-royal-mail (Dec 11, 2009)

I recommend googling for immediate answers to a lot of these types of excel questions as it seems everybody uses excel a bit differently. But to answer your question, here is my setup:

Security PV cost	$gain/loss %gain/loss

X	$6,490.05 $6,056.95 $433.10 7.15%

Formula for % is:

=-1+B22/C22

(substitute 22 for row number)


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## Synergy (Mar 18, 2013)

the-royal-mail said:


> I recommend googling for immediate answers to a lot of these types of excel questions as it seems everybody uses excel a bit differently)


Thanks, I normally do that. That's how I figured out how to create a pivot table.

I know how to calculate the percentages outside of the pivot table, I was just wondering if there's a way to include this information so it resides inside the pivot table. I'm sure with a little more work I'll figure it out.


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## Synergy (Mar 18, 2013)

Figured it out. Simply created a pie chart and changed the data labels to show values as percentage. Thanks again Spudd.


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## mrbizi (Dec 19, 2009)

I use Quicken. It calculates IRR, shows you your asset allocation (by asset class and holdings). If you like graphs , it creates these automatically as well. What I like most about it is that it automatically updates stock and mutual fund prices-quite a time saver and reduces errors. If you don't like playing with excel this might be the solution for you.


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## Synergy (Mar 18, 2013)

mrbizi said:


> I use Quicken. It calculates IRR, shows you your asset allocation (by asset class and holdings). If you like graphs , it creates these automatically as well. What I like most about it is that it automatically updates stock and mutual fund prices-quite a time saver and reduces errors. If you don't like playing with excel this might be the solution for you.


Thanks I'll check out Quicken. I'm pretty happy with my excel spreadsheets so far. I'm able to calculate XIRR, ACB, returns, etc., and I can create as many charts as I'd like. I'm also able to have my stock prices updated automatically. So far so good.


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## AltaRed (Jun 8, 2009)

I have used Quicken since almost the beginning. Version 6 I think for Windows 95... Certainly Quicken 98. The only downside is one needs to update every 3 years (built in expiry date) if one wants to keep getting insitutional downloads and/or price updating for stocks and mutual funds. Or if one wants to just enter data manually, then a ten year old version will still work. For the $35/yr or so, it is peace of mind... less than a short night out at the pub.


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## My Own Advisor (Sep 24, 2012)

I suppose I should track my portfolio more, but with a few indexed products in my registered accounts, I don't feel the need to track them closely. I don't track my CDN stocks very much in the non-registered account; investing for income with dividend payers and don't feel the need to monitor them other than a few times per year when I want to buy more.

I'm pretty lazy when it comes to investing - maybe a bad thing.


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## 6811 (Jan 1, 2013)

Came across this link in a John Heinzl (G&M) column recently: http://longrundata.com/. This tool tracks historical dividend payouts for most equities and ETFs, as well as total returns for periods you can choose. I'm finding it very useful.


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## pwm (Jan 19, 2012)

I've been using Quicken since it was a DOS app, before Win 3.1 so I have you beat on that AltaRed. It was version 4.0 I believe. My data goes back to 1990. I don't use online update, so I don't update the software very often. I'm using Quicken 2009 now. I like Quicken very much and would recommend it. The price of all Intuit software is the only downside.


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## pwm (Jan 19, 2012)

Just realized that I didn't address the original questions which was what do you track. I'm most interested in things like compound annual return and the relative performance of various holdings, what percentage of total each comprises; that sort of thing. The built in Quicken reports are excellent, and the report data can be exported to Excel.


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## pwm (Jan 19, 2012)

Another afterthought: Forgot to mention ACB. Quicken does a good job showing this number, but I haven't found a good way to enter ROC so that it will be reflected in the ACB number.


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