Gyroscopic Investing

Hi all,

I'm using a simple excell sheet from google docs to keep track of my pp's performance.

What do you guys use to keep track of your portfolio?

Also, now I always have to update the valuations of the different assets by going to internet pages. If I would use portfolio software this would be automatic, does anybody use more advanced portfolio software?

Thank you all for this forum, it's wonderful.

I think Excel is good.  I use the XIRR function to track my returns. 

I have an Excel spreadsheet that keeps up with everything, including tracking the percentages and translating PRPFX into HB PP terms.

If you want more information about how I translate PRPFX into a larger HB PP i did a few long posts in the BH thread describing how I disassembled PRPFX and categorized it for purposes of using it within a traditional HB PP.

If you use Google Docs, I found a neat way to import the current share price so your spreadsheet is always up to date:
If B2 is the cell that has your ticker symbol, like VTI, for example, this will work.

Google Docs spreadsheet is the way to go. This function:

=GoogleFinance(A6)

will return a recent trade price for the ticker symbol in cell A6. And this function:

=Googlefinance(A6, "closeyest")

will return yesterday's closing price. Then of course you can compare the two to get today's change. For mutual funds you can also do:

=GoogleFinance(A10,"changepct")*1%

I also borrowed someone's treasury calculation spreadsheet to automatically pull those values in for 30yr bonds. - pretty complicated and not 100% uptime.

The single page shows me:
* my total invested
* total and percentage change from yesterday, color-coded
* total and percentage change YTD
* percentage in each investment
* expenses paid by each investment and in total

It does not show very well the dates of purchase and total capital gains for tax purposes.
It does not compute the bullion price of gold.

It is good enough. Now I am trying to build up the amount of time between when I look at it. I almost went a whole day, but that was the day the market crashed 2% or so, so I had to look. I'd like to get up to a week.

Thanks for the tips, MadMoney, =GoogleFinance(A6) is way easier than the way I was doing it.

"If you want more information about how I translate PRPFX into a larger HB PP i did a few long posts in the BH thread describing how I disassembled PRPFX and categorized it for purposes of using it within a traditional HB PP."

MT, I would love to find that as I have all of my PP in PRPFX. Any idea about when you posted that on BH?

Reub wrote: "If you want more information about how I translate PRPFX into a larger HB PP i did a few long posts in the BH thread describing how I disassembled PRPFX and categorized it for purposes of using it within a traditional HB PP."

MT, I would love to find that as I have all of my PP in PRPFX. Any idea about when you posted that on BH?

Try searching for "Swiss Franc" under my posts.  That will probably get you there.

Neat tricks!

Is there also a simple way to create a spreadsheet that doesn't just replace the old values with the latest ones, but automatically maintains a list of all previous values?

Clive wrote: Peter Ponzo used to run a web site called gummy stuff, but has since dropped maintaining that web site. Someone however copied the content to the financial webring so its all still available at http://www.financialwebring.org/gummy-s ... _stuff.htm

There's a whole wealth of Excel spreadsheets that you can use or modify including some for maintaining a portfolio and download current prices etc.

This is one of several examples http://www.financialwebring.org/gummy-s ... racker.htm

That was fast. Thanks!

He doesn't do things the way I hoped, but there's plenty of inspiration to be found in his files for slapping something together myself.

Google Spreadsheets works great for me. I use it to:
* Get current prices of stocks (via the GoogleFinance()) function
* Get current buy prices on metals from several online PM companies (via the importhtml() table scraping function)
* Calculate current value on my various 30 year treasury holdings (using the price() function)
* Calculate the average return, both of individual assets, and of the PP as a whole (using the XIRR() function)

The nice part about using Google Spreadsheets is I can view my PP from anywhere I have a web browser, from my phone for instance.

fnord123 wrote: Google Spreadsheets works great for me. I use it to:
* Get current prices of stocks (via the GoogleFinance()) function
* Get current buy prices on metals from several online PM companies (via the importhtml() table scraping function)
* Calculate current value on my various 30 year treasury holdings (using the price() function)
* Calculate the average return, both of individual assets, and of the PP as a whole (using the XIRR() function)

The nice part about using Google Spreadsheets is I can view my PP from anywhere I have a web browser, from my phone for instance.

+1 for Google.

There is a downside to some of these solutions: the easier it is to assess your total returns, the more often you will check them. And the more susceptible you may be to market timing and deviating from the PP, particularly when our return is lagging a conventional benchmark.

6 Iron wrote: There is a downside to some of these solutions: the easier it is to assess your total returns, the more often you will check them. And the more susceptible you may be to market timing and deviating from the PP, particularly when our return is lagging a conventional benchmark.

You mean you don't think people are just using these tools to look in on things once a year? 

6 Iron wrote: There is a downside to some of these solutions: the easier it is to assess your total returns, the more often you will check them. And the more susceptible you may be to market timing and deviating from the PP, particularly when our return is lagging a conventional benchmark.

Right, MadMoneyMachine's comment about trying not to check too often is particularly prescient.  I find that when I am caught up in my work I don't pay as much attention to my portfolio, which overall is a good thing.  Of course, it's also bad to find out that your portfolio dropped 1-2% on a day you weren't watching it.  I'm still trying to figure out what the right thing to do is there.  Perhaps check less often; most of the time a 1-2% drop is followed by a 2-3% gain in less than a week.

MediumTex wrote:
You mean you don't think people are just using these tools to look in on things once a year?   :D

Speaking for myself, I used to check mine like a crack addict. Daily (or more).

6 Iron wrote:

MediumTex wrote:
You mean you don't think people are just using these tools to look in on things once a year?   :D

Speaking for myself, I used to check mine like a crack addict. Daily (or more).

I think it would probably be a good thing for everyone to check their portfolios a lot less often.

It's hard to do, though.

Having a portfolio you trust is probably the best way to build the discipline needed to look in on things less often.

For close to up to the minute I like smartmoney portfolio tracker  http://www.smartmoney.com/

I also use excel spreadsheets where I just copy and paste from my brokage account.

Wauw, thank you all very much for your helpful information!

Didn't know google docs could be used in such an advanced way.

You can set up something similar on a "My Yahoo" page.

anonymous538 wrote: Wauw, thank you all very much for your helpful information!

Didn't know google docs could be used in such an advanced way.

Google Docs have advanced to a pretty good tool during the last couple of years. You can even create scripts that will be invoked at specific times of day and do all kinds of processing if you have a passion to programming. I use a simple script that sorts the mutual funds by returns daily - basically a programmatic replacement of a manual click on the column header's "Sort sheet" menu option.

Talking about the frequency of "checking out" the portfolio: I noticed that I vary rarely check my PP, but do check my VP more often. Maybe I should separate them into completely different documents so the PP is farther away from my hands. 

I avoid looking at my portfolio specifics as much as I can, but once in awhile I'm curious to see which asset is holding up the portfolio at any given time. I just bookmark the following URL:

http://www.google.com/finance/chart?cht ... hy&tlf=12h

and that gives me a quick real-time peek at the PP — if I want to take its pulse.

It looks like this:



(VTI is red, GLD is yellow, TLT is blue and SHY is green).

I find that occasionally glancing at those squiggly lines allows me to go a few weeks without checking my actual portfolio numbers. It's a bit like peeking at the drizzling code of the Matrix. And by only glancing at this URL I avoid looking at financial websites and their meaningless time-consuming articles. It's still a little addictive though, but at least it allows me to be more detached from my detailed PP performance.

Hint: You can change that URL to pretty much any array of securities — you just have to remember which color corresponds to each security.

foglifter wrote:Google Docs have advanced to a pretty good tool during the last couple of years. You can even create scripts that will be invoked at specific times of day and do all kinds of processing if you have a passion to programming. I use a simple script that sorts the mutual funds by returns daily - basically a programmatic replacement of a manual click on the column header's "Sort sheet" menu option.

I didn't know about this, so I went and found the docs after seeing this post.

One thing that seemed to be missing was the ability to store data in the Google Cloud.  I'd like to take daily snapshots of my PP to see how its value is changing over time, but don't want to setup a MySql server somewhere.  Anyone know if there is a way to do this with the data staying on Google's servers somewhere?

Anyone know how to compute CAGR (given a starting and ending value, and number of years) using google docs?  It looks like rate() should do it, but I haven't been able to get it to work.  I'm looking for the equivalent of what in openoffice would be rri(years;start;end).

rickb wrote:Anyone know how to compute CAGR (given a starting and ending value, and number of years) using google docs?  It looks like rate() should do it, but I haven't been able to get it to work.  I'm looking for the equivalent of what in openoffice would be rri(years;start;end).

See here: http://www.experiglot.com/2006/10/17/ho ... d-returns/

The above link talks about Excel, but GoogleDocs also supports XIRR.  He also describes (in linked articles) simpler ways of calculating CAGR if you only have a single start date/end date/start value/end value.