If you are looking for a way to track your portfolio, you may have considered the Yahoo Finance portfolio tracker. If you are serious about trading you will notice that it only allows you to see the total gain for your portfolio and individual trades but that’s about it. Let’s take a look at how Stock Portfolio Organizer offers more features and choices to enable you to track the performance of your portfolio more fully and more adequately.
Below are some of the features of Stock Portfolio Organizer compared to Yahoo Finance.
1. Stock Portfolio Organizer’s big list of metrics
Yahoo Finance only calculates the simple return for your holdings – the difference between what you paid and its value now.
This does not give you a full picture of how much you are making every year. See that +51% gain in the above screenshot? It’s actually an annualized gain of 9.6% over the years. Stock Portfolio Organizer, on the other hand, can calculate the annualized gain and so much more. Stock Portfolio Organizer has a big list of metrics that it calculates ranging from the average number of days a profitable trade is held to various risk management metrics like the average risk to reward ratio.
Yahoo Finance does not have the capacity to allow you to filter your holdings by date. Stock Portfolio Organizer allows you to not only filter by date but by a list of symbols or whether you have specified a stop loss for the trade etc. This along with the large number of metrics allows you to analyse your holdings in ways that are only limited by your imagination.
2. Stock Portfolio Organizer’s ability to track the impact of brokerage and other income like dividends and trust distributions
Yahoo Finance does not allow you to track and include other factors that influence the value of your portfolio. Remember that +51% gain earlier? It doesn’t include any brokerage nor does it factor in the fact that we have trades in different currencies. Holdings in different currencies need to be converted to a base currency before an accurate gain can be calculated. Stock Portfolio Organizer does both with ease and even allows you to create brokerage and currency conversion formulas.
Yahoo Finance doesn’t allow you to record income in the form of dividends and trust distributions. So if you own any trusts or dividend generating stocks you will need to maintain a separate excel spreadsheet to track that income. Stock Portfolio Organizer can do that and even calculate interesting metrics such as the average return on investment – that is the average return that your investments in trusts and dividend generating stocks have returned in the form of income.
3. Stock Portfolio Organizer allows you to track complex instruments such as Forex (FX), CFD’s, Futures etc.
Yahoo Finance only lets you track the simple return for share trades. If you trade more complex instruments such as Forex (FX), CFD’s, Futures etc you are out of luck. Stock Portfolio Organizer supports all these and more.
4. Stock Portfolio Organizer lets you chart your portfolio’s performance
Yahoo finance does not allow you to chart the performance of your portfolio. Stock Portfolio Organizer, on the other hand, allows you to chart the performance of your portfolio and also allows you to apply various filters to the trades. It also allows you to chart more than one performance curve so you can make comparisons between different groups of trades. For example, if you want to compare the performance of your investments in mining stocks against health stocks you can do that.
Conclusion
There are many more examples of the extra features and capabilities that Stock Portfolio Organizer has. You can check them out for yourself by trying the trial version here.
Another noteworthy feature of Stock Portfolio Organizer is that it’s a desktop application. Data is stored on your computer, so it is secure and you will never lose access to it. Just recently in 2017 Google shut down its portfolio tracking feature, who is to say that it can’t happen to other portfolio managing systems.
We are proud to announce the release of V1.11.6946.41042! This is the first non beta release.
This release contains a number of bug fixes and usability improvements and features. The most notable changes is that there have been many improvements and features added to improve the position sizing & risk management functionality in the program. More metrics have been added to the summary view. Charts now have the ability to plot multiple results on the same chart so that you can compare the performance of of different trades groups etc.
Features:
Added certain technical analysis indicators to the formula language such as AverageTrueRange, ExponentialMovingAverage etc. to make it easier to create certain stop loss & position sizing formulas.
Added certain miscellaneous functions to the formula language such as GetPositionTypeDisplayString etc.
The default start date & time can now be changed via the application settings window.
Added ‘Current Stop Loss’ field to trades to better support trailing stop losses.
Added ability to filter trades by whether they have a stop loss or target.
Added many additional trade metrics to the summary view.
Improvements:
Improved how custom grid formula errors are displayed.
Improved performance of custom grids and instrument formulas.
Improved how data feeds are displayed in the main navigation panel.
Ticker info data should now be updated as soon as data arrives.
Improved how instrument formula errors are displayed.
Improved the ‘Include Subdirectories’ option when importing Metastock data or symbols.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed a bug where the display precision could not be changed in settings.
Fixed a rare bug where changing users could lead to a lockup.
Fixed a bug where Date & Time values in instrument & custom grid formulas was being converted to a string.
Fixed a bug where printing a view with a boolean column would throw an error.
Fixed a bug where deselecting a Trade Group would throw an exception.
Fixed a bug that allowed you to import ticker symbols with more than 32 characters.
Fixed a rare multi threading bug that could lock up the program when switching users.
Fixed a bug where the date & time in views was not formatted according to the current users currency culture.