One thing that might be useful to a lot of retail investors is that you can now import stock data automatically from Google Finance.
Google Docs and Google Sheets has actually gotten a lot better.
Over my 10 years of investing, my portfolio tracker has become, at many times, much more complex, and then more recently, far more simplified, as my time has gotten more precious to me.īut spreadsheets are the simplest and best way to do it. Thomas: I use Excel just like everybody else. What do you, Frank Thomas, the fellow armchair investor, use? Do you use a spreadsheet? What tools do you use to track? Whereas, hey, I'm just an armchair investor, and that's really me, David Gardner. I sure hope you do, because we're a for profit company. You probably have tools and resources here at The Fool. Gardner: Frank, are you doing this typically now? You are, of course, our director of investing intelligence. Using both those perspective captures all the detail you could possibly need. A cash out would be investing in the market, each individual transaction, and then you get the overall output, the overall cash out at the end, which is the current price. And then also, I'll track the overall position using, the technical phrase is "cash in, cash out money-weighted return." You're literally tracking each individual purchase as a cash flow. I track them side by side to parse out that detail that he was talking about specifically. Then, if you add to it at $67, on a separate line, maybe in a spreadsheet, or maybe a tool, I don't know if you have one you'll tell us about, you then have a separate one where you're also showing where the market was then, and you can see them both. For example, if you buy a stock at $40, you put it in right there, you mark the market against it, the S&P 500. I can track if I'm I buying at the right valuation, or what have you. First, I track individual lots or investments each time I buy a stock, so I can parse out the performance of different purchases. Thomas: Personally with my own portfolio, I track it in two different ways. the market, do you include subsequent purchases?" Frank, how do you think about that? How do we account for that here at the Fool? Anthony goes on, "When you reference your percentage gains vs. Great time listening and walking my dog Fusko as I dogpod.". This is from Anthony, whose screen name is BallroomBlitz. People start looking at that, and they think, how do I account for that? What tool do I use to keep up with that? That's a little bit of the theme here, why I wanted to have you in, Frank. And then they might buy more of it because we say, add to your winners. That is that they'll buy a stock, which is good, and then that stock might go up. We have a particular problem that I think sometimes we create here at Rule Breaker Investing for members and listeners. Gardner: A lot of questions this month coming from people who are keeping up with their own returns and calculating how they're doing.
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In this mailbag segment from the Rule Breaker Investing podcast, host and Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner invites Frank Thomas, The Motley Fool's director of investing intelligence, to answer a couple of listeners' questions, and talk about the tools and techniques everyday retail investors can use to simplify the task of tracking their returns. Whatever your investing strategy, though, one thing is vital: You need to keep an honest and accurate score of how each of your investments is doing - which gets a lot more difficult. But taking either approach means you'll sometimes be buying shares of a company at multiple different prices. Elsewhere, there are folks who think you should double down on your losers, on the theory that those shares have become better bargains.
Here at The Motley Fool, we believe that winners tend to keep winning, which leads naturally to the idea that you may want to add more shares to your rising stock positions.