How To Choose The Best Investment Tracking App
The best way to track your investments depends on the complexity of your portfolio. For those with just a single account, a portfolio tracking app isnt necessary. If all of your investments are in a 401k at work, you can simply track and manage your investments through the brokerage that holds your 401k. Likewise, if you have a single IRA account, you can track that investment easily wherever it is being held.
If youre looking to open an IRA here are the best IRA accounts available today.
If, like me, you have multiple investment accounts, a tracking app is the best way to manage your investments. Thats particularly true if you hold investments at different brokers. This is common when individuals open up IRAs at brokers and have 401ks elsewhere. Its also common with spouses who often have retirement accounts at different financial institutions.
For these types of portfolios, an investment tracker that automatically downloads transactions and balances is ideal. Here, you want to look for an investment app that offers tools to help you analyze your portfolio. The most important tools give you insight into your asset allocation, investment fees and retirement readiness.
We rate Personal Capital as the absolute best investment tracking app, because it does all of this for free. The other apps in our list are also good options.
Best Investment Tracking App: Personal Capital
Its a close call, but Personal Capital is the winner.
The suite of free tools is perfect for investors just getting started, while the managed portfolio option is geared towards the professionals. Plus, the real-life professional financial advisor is an invaluable tool to help guide you on your investment journey.
Mutual Fund And Etf Expenses
As Ive said many times, keeping investment expenses low is one of the most important factors for successful investing. And Personal Capital gives you two tools to help you. The first is a breakdown of your investment costs by mutual fund or ETF.
In my case, total investment costs are a real eye-opener. Personal Capital breaks down the cost by fund or ETF, so that you can focus your analysis and determine whether you need to make any changes. Through using the tool, it became clear to me that there are a couple of funds I need to dump for less expensive alternatives.
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What Is A Stock Portfolio Tracker
First, what are we talking about when we ask for the best stock portfolio trackers? We want a tool that can collect all of our investments and give us an understanding of how it is performing. Much like personal finance apps, we want it to be as seamless as possible and give us the ability to quickly analyze our holdings in a variety of ways.
As we list the best options below, we take into account the cost of the subscription , as well as the speed and usability of the platform.
Ticker: Stocks Portfolio Manager
- Platform: iOS
- Cost: Free
The Ticker app lets you manage multiple stock portfoliosthink growth, technology, and retirement portfoliosfrom one dashboard. Colorful charts, graphs, and detailed analytics show real-time account values, profit/loss, daily profit/loss, allocation money-weighted rate of return , and time-weighted rate of return , plus symbol-relevant news.
Manually enter trade information for stocks, currency pairs like EUR/USD, mutual funds, and ETFs, including dividends, splits, buy/sell orders, ticker symbol, trade size, price, date, and brokerage fees. Keep track of stocks with multiple watch lists, and create alerts to notify you if a stock trades above or below a trigger level you set, based on price, volume, and percent changes.
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What Are The Common Portfolio Tracker Features
What is the main intent of having a portfolio tracker?
Here we focus on all-in-one portfolio trackers, rather than budgeting or investment management tools, even though there are some overlapping features.
Are there specific essential-to-have features that you require? We grouped portfolio tracking features into:
- asset support: which investment types are supported and how good is investment selection for each
- broker linkage: broker account linking support , wallet/exchange linking for cryptos
- portfolio summary: at a glance aggregation view, allocation distribution by segments, net worth view, etc.
- drill-down: detailed asset-specific information
- portfolio gains: daily and total gains for portfolio, segments and investments
- historical performance: portfolios past performance charts, wealth growth charts
- monitoring: price change alerts, upcoming events alerts
- comparison: performance comparisons against various benchmarks
- news: asset related news and commentary
- analysis: risk estimations, x-ray views, future projections
- research: investment screening, robo-advisors
- integrations with few supported brokers via trade confirmation emails
PROS:
- few interesting features
- safe solution to auto update your transactions via confirmation emails from few supported brokers
CONS:
What Is Your Preferred Device Type
There are still a few Windows/Mac portfolio tracker applications, but majority of them are either online web or mobile apps. Recently, there is a clear shift towards mobile friendly applications. If you want a mobile-first solution with offline access convenience, push notifications and auto-updates, you can use an iPhone or Android app. On the other hand, web based online solutions are available on both desktop and mobile browsers. Recently there is a rise of smart watch apps, so some features are available in iOS/WearOS watches as well. We categorised all-in-one portfolio trackers in a comparison summary table as:
- iPhone or Android app
- Mac or Windows software
- Apple or WearOS watch
Note: if you are Apple Watch user, you might be interested in our blog on Apple Watch portfolio trackers as well.
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Why You Should Use An Investment Tracking App
Using an investment tracking app may give you the knowledge you need to manage your finances properly. If you have investment accounts at several brokerages, you need to look at your investments in a big picture way.
Using an investment tracking app that automatically updates your investments makes this much easier and less time-intensive. Some apps even give you insights into your overall costs, asset allocation, and other critical investing concepts that you can use to make better decisions about how to invest moving forward. Without this information, you may accidentally invest in a way that doesnt help you meet your true investing goals.
For instance, you may not realize that mutual funds from two different brokerages actually hold similar investments and arent providing the diversification you were hoping for. In other cases, you may not realize youre asset allocation is overweight in stocks, leaving you open to a larger than anticipated decline if in price rapidly.
Stockmarketeye: Best Stock Portfolio Tracker Housed On Your Device
- Available via desktop, tablet, iOS and Android
- Price: $74.99/year
Are you caught up in the market, checking several different sources to track performance? Instead of constantly refreshing multiple apps or browser windows, keep tabs on all your investments in one place and stay on top of the markets with StockMarketEye.
Use this powerful, clean-looking stock tracker to leverage financial information at the convenience of your fingertipsall without having to spend time learning software. Instead, use that time focusing on your trades and investment performance.
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Track Your Investments With Spreadsheets
For those who want an added measure of control over their investment tracking, custom spreadsheets are among the best options. There are typically two major choices in this category.
- Microsoft Excel: Though its ability to import real-time stock quotes is inadequate for the average investor, Microsoft Excel can be used to track the cost basis for taxes on individual lots, as well as calculate aggregate dividend income or map it out on a dividend schedule, including warning you about an ex-dividend date.
- Google Spreadsheets: Google’s free online spreadsheet program isn’t as powerful as Excel, but it does make it easier to have your documents automatically update with information taken from public finance such as Yahoo. In addition, because it’s an internet-based program, you can log in to your Google account anywhere in the world to access your Google spreadsheets.
How To Choose The Best All
If you are reading this post, chances are that you are looking for a solution to track all of your investments in one place. What exactly fits YOU depends on your needs and preferences. Your time is a commodity , so we will highlight portfolio selection aspects covered in this topic straight away. See further details below and decide if theyre relevant for you. To find the best all-in-one portfolio tracker we will need to answer these questions:
Answers to above questions will help you to select the right all-in-one portfolio tracker. We will go through these in more details and will provide a comparison table with summary analysis for what we think are the best all-in-one portfolio tracking options in the market.
We will also elaborate on our selection and will mention several products that did not make the cut and the reasons behind it.
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A Wide Range Of Available Coins And Exchanges
A portfolio tracker should be a one-stop shop for all of your coins. Look for a cryptocurrency portfolio tracker that offers connectivity with all of the coins and all the exchanges youre on.
If you search for a combination tracker and exchange, take a look at the platforms coin offerings before you decide to sign up for an account. This will allow you to trade all of the coins you want without working with multiple exchanges and memorizing passwords.
Sofi: Best Stock Tracking App
SoFi has many of the same benefits as M1 Finance, such as no minimum investment to open an account and the ability to seamlessly move money between investment accounts.
The app offers a robust user experience on iPhones for tracking stocks because the service provides trading capabilities to active and passive traders alike. The watchlists provide real-time data for you to follow along as your stocks move in price.
Users can invest actively and have full control over the stocks and funds in their portfolio or they can invest more passively by choosing a pre-built portfolio based on their level of risk aversion and financial status.
Real people, not robots, create the pre-build portfolios. SoFi also allows fractional sharing, which they call stock bits.
SoFi doesnt offer stock options trading or tax-loss harvesting. However, it does allow you to invest in cryptocurrency, which isnt available by all competitors.
You can use tools to see your moneys potential growth and have access to Certified Financial Planners if you have further questions.
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Do You Need Automatic Transaction Synchronisation
If you frequently buy or sell assets and you dont have automatic transaction synchronisation, manual input in the tracker might be laborious.
To keep your asset quantities up to date you have four options:
Updating portfolio transactions manually is the safest option, however if you are buying/selling say stocks and cryptos on a daily basis, it might be off putting manual work overhead.
On the other hand, there are portfolio trackers that can automatically load transaction data from your brokers. Authorising access is a privacy exposure and increases risk of security breach. Such portfolio trackers need to prove they have genuine bank-grade security level.
Will you wish to provide personal details and allow all-in-one portfolio tracker to query your transactions from your investment brokers? We consider this aspect as one of the key criteria for selecting the best portfolio trackers and we highlight broker linkage feature in the comparison summary table.
Things To Consider When Picking An Investment Tracking App
It can be hard to know which investment app will be the best fit for you.
Here are a few things to consider before choosing an investment tracking app:
Are you a novice or experienced investor?
The type of investor you are will play a huge role in the kind of app you end up using.
For instance, SigFig and Mint are better for beginner investors, while Personal Capital and Morningstar cater to more serious investors.
How functional is the software?
Does it require manual updates? Is it fairly intuitive to use, or is there a significant learning curve?
Consider the functionality of the software, and whether you think it fits with your habits and lifestyle.
What are the features you really need to be included?
For instance, if you only need a way to manage your budget, Mint will probably be your best bet.
However, if you need investment advice, then youre probably better off going with Personal Capital or Morningstar.
Before choosing an investment tracking app, take some time to consider what features you need to be included.
Is there a monthly fee? And is it worth it to you?
If youre a serious investor, paying an annual fee for a service like Morningstar may be worth it.
But if not, you may be able to find a free service that will get the job done.
Is there a minimum investment to get started?
Many financial services dont require a minimum investment, but some do.
How much information do you need access to?
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Best Stock Tracking Apps At A Glance
The best stock tracking app for you isnt necessarily the perfect app for someone else. Your best choice is likely one of the following:
- Best investment portfolio tracker app :
- Best for buy-and-hold investors: Motley Fool Stock Advisor
- Best stock tracker with investment research + stock recommendations: Seeking Alpha
- Best stock portfolio tracker housed on your device: StockMarketEye
- Best portfolio management software : Personal Capital
- Best portfolio tracking app for all assets: Kubera
- Best stock tracking app for Windows and Mac: Stock Rover
- Best website to view stocks: Webull
- Best for sophisticated investors: TradeStation
- Best stock tracking app for Android: M1 Finance
- Best stock tracking app for iPhone: SoFi: , Android, Desktop
While one of the stock trading apps above likely suits your needs, there are more apps worth looking into, such as:
- Yahoo! Finance
Lets look deeper into the top picks and the pros and cons of each.
Other Things To Include In Your Trading Journal
There are other items you’ll want to include in your trading journal. Here’s where using a binder comes in handy.
Before and during your trades, print or cut out and save anything you may have come across that influenced your thinking in regard to this position. It can be a blog about this one particular stock or it could be a newspaper article about an event that might affect an entire industry. Anything that you found during your research.
The idea is to save anything that influenced your trade so that you can analyze your own trading systems.
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How To Track All Your Mutual Fund Transactions And Folio Numbers At One Place
1 min read.Avneet Kaur
MFU allows a mutual fund customer to transact through a common transaction form. It enables single payment for multiple scheme investments across various mutual funds.
Most high networth individuals invest through an advisor. These advisors offer services such as portfolio reports and portfolio analysis to their clients. The investors do not have to maintain a special log to track their mutual fund transactions. Moreover, in case the investor needs some info, the advisor is just a call away. But for retail investors, one of the most common issue is to maintain their mutual fund portfolio at one place. MF Utility offers a solution.
MF Utility was formally launched in January 2015 but most new retail investors are not aware of it. MFU is an innovative ‘Shared Services’ initiative by the mutual fund industry under the aegis of AMFI, which acts as a Transaction Aggregation Portal”.
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MFU allows a mutual fund customer to transact through a common transaction form. It enables single payment for multiple scheme investments across various mutual funds.
It shows the list of schemes, number of units held, current value of each fund, scheme folio number and current total value of your mutual fund investments across participating AMCs.
As on date, MFU has 39 mutual fund houses under its ambit. MF Utility is equally owned by the participating AMCs.
How To Keep All Your Financial Accounts & Assets Neatly Organized
Dont let disorganization become one of your biggest money problems.
Its easy to lose or misplace money. But unlike finding $20 in an old jacket, what if a bank or investment account containing thousands goes untouched for years because you forgot about it or never told anyone it existed?
For various financial accounts, holdings, investments, loans, tax returns, and other arrangements, you need to gather account information and relevant contacts. If youre wondering why its worth taking the time to get all this info in one place, just think of the people you love. By organizing your financial and legal documents, if something happens to you your family can more easily:
- Apply for and claim benefits
- Get through the probate process
- Close bank accounts
- Pay any final estate or income taxes
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