How to Properly Track your Investment Portfolio

Many investors have their investments spread across multiple accounts and it can be difficult to properly track the value of your overall portfolio. Your investment portfolio includes 401(k)s, IRAs, and investment accounts with multiple brokerage accounts. You could try to go to multiple websites and gather all of the performance yourself. However, sometimes that is not efficient, so I wanted to walk through a few ways to efficiently track your investment portfolio. Please comment if you have any follow up questions or if you use any additional tools to properly track your investment portfolio.

• Personal Capital: This is a comprehensive app for tracking all of your financial activities, including your investment portfolio. It also can track your net worth which is a nice bonus. One of the biggest benefits is you can link multiple investment accounts separately and have a dashboard to look at your portfolio performance and investment allocations. I personally use this, and it helps me to efficiently track my investments.
• Ticker: Ticker is a detailed dashboard that allows you to review graphs and reports on your own rather than solely relying on recommendations or suggestions from professionals. Ticker allows you to see detailed and real-time data regarding the value of all of your accounts. It also allows you to see your profits and losses and other important key details. One feature I really like is the push notification alerts that is based on different metrics, such as price changes, volume changes, and other key triggers. Its an app for both the desktop and your phone.
• Morningstar: Morningstar is another great tracking tool well-suited for new investors. It makes it easy to evaluate the performance of different investments with visual graphs and charts. The side by side comparison features are really helpful. You aren’t able to link your accounts, so it does take some time to set up within Morningstar. You do get very detailed information on your holdings, its performance, and really great tips on diversifying your portfolio.
• Google Finance: Google Finance is one of the most simple tracking tools, but its also very intuitive and helpful. You can create a portfolio within Google and its tracks your investments. This online tool puts together basic charts and helps you monitor specific investments, This is not a very complex tool where you can do in-depth analysis, but it is an easy way to get real-time stock updates and generally monitor the market.