How do you track your portfolio?

Hey everyone! I just started to invest on my own last year after taking the CFA level 1 exam and was wondering if some of you with more experience can share some helpful tips. I’m mostly in index funds right now, but have been adding some of my own stock ideas to the mix.

I was curious how everyone manages to keep track of their portfolio holdings. Do you use some kind of software product or add-on in Excel? Right now, I’m just doing it all by hand with Excel and it is getting tedious to separate each stock in the index fund by their own portfolio weighting and industry. The reason I ask is because I want to be able to see what all my positions are on an individual stock level so I don’t end up with too high of a concentration in one industry.

Anything you guys can share with me would be appreciated. Thanks all!

What’s tedious about doing it in excel? How many positions do you have?

Excel is fine for calculating returns and working out sector/geographical weightings I’d have thought.

If someone can recommend a good portfolio management tool that is better than excel and also free (or at least cheap), I’d be very interested also. Generally you are looking at paying six figures per annum for those systems in institutional land.

Personal Capital has a portfolio breakdown function that knows the composition for say, SPY or Vanguard 500, and can make a bar chart with your sector composition or asset type composition. It’s not perfect; for instance, it doesn’t know how to break down small cap indexes, like IWM. However, for what you are trying to do, it sounds good enough. It’s probably best to skip the single stock breakdown if you have the sector breakdown. I doubt you need to track all 500 stocks in SPX if you know the sectors.

I have some issues with Personal Capital, but overall, it’s a pretty useful service. If you don’t use something like this or Mint, it is worth trying it out.

I would not be surprised if your fund provider also provides this sort of service. It’s not that complicated for an investment provider to put together.

What platform are you using? Most have some kind of dashboard/tracker that you can use with little effort on your part.

Thanks for all the replies.

I’m using Interactive Brokers for my personal account. The institution I work at uses Advent Software and it is prohibitively expensive for an individual.

i usually use an individual excel model for each individual stock to determine target price. when done i place the base target price on google finance portfolio as the price at which i bought it as. google will automatically update prices. The higher the negative percentage, the better the value.

You do not need a third party software for this, acquiring data from the internet and generating reports and charts in excel is very simple to automate