Online tools for monitoring my portfolio gains/losses in real time?
"This functionality is widely available, not only on brokerage sites, but also financial management and even financial information sites.  For instance, two of the latter are Google Finance and Yahoo Finance.  If you are logged in, they let you create ""portfolios"" listing your stocks and, optionally, the size of your holdings in that stock (which you don't need if you are just ""watching"" a stock).  Then you can visit the site at any time and see the current valuations." Do you have a broker? Any online brokerage (TD Ameritrade, E*Trade, Scott Trade, etc) offer the functionality that you want. If you're not interested in opening a brokerage account, you can search for threads here related to stock market simulation, since most of those services also provide the features that you want.  If you do you have a physical broker at some firm, contact him/her and ask about the online tools that the brokerage offers. Almost all of them have portfolio management tools available to clients. "I use Google Finance too. The only thing I have problem with is dividend info which it wouldn't automatically add to my portfolio. At the same time, I think that's a lot to ask for a free web site tool. So when dividend comes, I manually ""deposit"" the dividend payment by updating the cash amount. If the dividend comes in share form, I do a BUY at price 0 for that particular stock. If you only have 5 stocks, this additional effort is not bad at all. I also use the Hong Kong version of it so perhaps there maybe an implementation difference across country versions. Hope this helps. CF" The trick is real time. I like to wake up in the morning, turn on my computer and see at a glance the gain or loss data on each of my stock and bond at that moment.   Companies like Ameritrde offer them, but you have to enroll and trade stock in them.
I am considering making my investment history publicly available online What is the benefit you are looking for by doing this? Just to establish that you are a successful investor, so in long run can predict things ... have tons of followers? If so yes. Go ahead. Updates to the portfolio would have to be near real-time than post facto else no one will believe you and it would be useless. are there any reasons (legal, personal, etc.) not to publicize my personal investment history legal, depends on country; I can't think any [check the agreement with your broker / depository] on how much can be displayed. i.e. they may forbid from revealing contract ref / or some other details. On Personal front, it depends who takes a liking to your stuff.  Relatives: They know you are making huge profits and may want to borrow stuff ... or queue up to you requesting to make similar huge profits for them; only to realize when there is loss they blame you ... this can strain relationships. Friends: Although close friends may have a general idea, if you are too successful and it shows; it can have its own set of issues to deal with. Colleagues / Manager: If you are too successful, it may mean you may notionally be earning more than them ... they would start unconsciously monitoring your behaviour ... this guy spends all day in office researching for stocks and doesn't work. That way he knows how to pick good stock ... he is wasting company time. The same happens if you are loosing stock ... a unrelated bad day you are having maybe equated to loss in stocks. Depending on the job / roles, they may move you to different role as the perceived risk of you swindling goes up. Generally important work doesn't get assigned, as it would be assumed that if you are successful in investing, you may quite soon and start full time into it. Identify Theft: As mentioned by keshlam, to much data one can easily risk identity theft. Realize phone banking to get some routine stuff just asks for basic details [that are available on face book] and few recent debits / credits to the account. This will be easy see the trades you have done. None of us here are expert identity theifs. But the real one have tons of way t "I've just recently launched an open source wealth management platform - wealthbot.io ...  ""Webo"" is mostly targeted at RIA's to help the manage multiple portfolios, etc. Take a look at the demo at demo.wealthbot.io, you'll also find links to github, etc. there. It's a rather involved project, but if you are looking for use cases of rebalancing, portfolio accounting, custodian integration, tax loss harvesting, and many other features available at some of the popular robo-advisors, you might find it interesting." "Unfortunately, there is very little data supporting fundamental analysis or technical analysis as appropriate tools to ""time"" the market. I will be so bold to say that technical analysis is meaningless. On the other hand, fundamental analysis has some merits. For example, the realization that CDOs were filled with toxic mortgages can be considered a product of fundamental analysis and hence provided traders with a directional assumption to buy CDSs. However, there is no way to tell when there is a good or bad time to buy or sell. The market behaves like a random 50/50 motion. There are many reasons for this and interestingly, there are many fundamentally sound companies that take large dips for no reason at all. Depending on your goal, you can either believe that this volatility will smooth over long periods and that the market has generally positive drift. On the other hand, I feel that the appropriate approach is to remain active. You will be able to mitigate the large downswings by simply staying small and diversifying  - not in the sense of traditional finance but rather looking for uncorrelated products. Remember, volatility brings higher levels of correlation. My second suggestion is to look towards products like options to provide a method of shaping your P/L - giving up upside by selling calls against a long equity position is a great example. Ground your trades with fundamental beliefs if need be, but use your tools and knowledge to combat risks that may create long periods of drawdown." "I use ""Money Manager Ex"" which is a Windows application I use on PC to log my transactions and for simple statistic. They have two versions, simple standlone application and self-hosted web app." I work for a fund management company and we get our news through two different service providers Bloomberg and Thomson One. They don't actually source the news though they just feed news from other providers Professional solutions (costs ranging from $300-1500+ USD/month/user) Bloomberg is available as a windows install or via Bloomberg Anywhere which offers bimometric access via browser. Bloomberg is superb and their customer support is excellent but they aren't cheap. If you're looking for a free amateur solution for stock news I'd take a look at There are dozens of other tools people can use for day trading that usually provide news and real time prices at a cost but I don't have any direct experience with them "Mint.com does this quite well. The graph views of your budgets, investments, debts, and other aspects of your financial life can be shown in gestalt, or on a per-account basis (at least, it does for me). See the investment ""how it works"" page for more information.  ""Find out whether you're beating the market–or it's beating you. Compare your portfolio to market benchmarks, and instantly see your asset allocation across all your investment accounts: 401k, mutual funds, brokerage accounts, even IRAs.""" Interactive Brokers provides historical intraday data including Bid, Ask, Last Trade and Volume for the majority of stocks. You can chart the data, download it to Excel or use it in your own application through their API.  EDIT: Compared to other solutions (like FreeStockCharts.com for instance), Interactive Brokers provides not only historic intraday LAST**** trades **but also historic BID and ASK data, which is very useful information if you want to design your own trading system.  I have enclosed a screenshot to the chart parameter window and a link to the API description. I want to mention I've found 2 options for more powerful tools that can be used to manage asset allocation:  Advantages/Disadvantages: Vanguard Morningstar X-ray I hope this helps others struggling with asset allocation. Most businesses have some sort of software to manage their client data.  Most of these various software and/or services are industry specific.  Black Diamond seems to be a client management tool targeting investment advisers. From the black diamond site Reach an unparalleled level of productivity and transform your client conversations. You don't need one of these unless you're a professional investment adviser with so many clients you can't track them yourself or need more robust reporting or statement generation tools. For your purposes most regular brokers, Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, TD, etc, have more than enough tools for the retail level investor.  They have news feeds, security analysis papers, historical data, stock screeners, etc.  You, a regular retail investor doesn't need to buy special software, your broker will generally provide these things as part of the service. "Back-testing itself is flawed. ""Past performance is no guarantee of future results"" is an important lesson to understand. Market strategies of one kind or another work until they don't.  Edited in -- AssetPlay.net provides a tool that's halfway to what you are looking for. It only goes back to 1972, however. Just to try it, I compared 100% S&P to a 60/40 blend of S&P with 5 yr t-bills (a misnamed asset, 5 yr treasuries are 'notes' not 'bills') I found the mix actually had a better return with lower volatility.  Now, can I count on that to work moving forward? Rates fell during most of this entire period so bonds/notes both looked pretty good. This is my point regarding the backtest concept.  GeniusTrader appears more sophisticated, but command line work on PCs is beyond me. It may be worth a look for you, JP. ETF Replay appears to be another backtest tool. It has its drawbacks, however, (ETFs only)" This would be a nice Raspberry Pi project for Mathematica, which comes bundled free on the Raspbian OS. You can program it up and leave it running.  It's not expensive and doesn't use much power. A program to monitor stock prices or volume could be written as simply as :-  This checks the volume of trades of Oct 2014 US crude oil futures every 30 seconds and sends an email if the volume jumps by more than 100. The financial data in this example is curated from Yahoo.  If specific data is not available or not updated frequently enough, if you can find an alternative online data source it's usually possible read the data in.  For example, this is apparently real-time data :- {Crude Oil, 92.79, -0.67, -0.71%} After leaving the above program running while writing this the volume of trades has risen like so :-  Edit I just set this running on a Raspberry Pi.  I had to use gmail for the email setup as described in this post: Configuring Mathematica to send email from a notebook.  Anyway, it's working.  Hope I don't get inundated with emails. ;-) "At the bottom of Yahoo! Finance's S & P 500 quote Quotes are real-time for NASDAQ, NYSE, and NYSE MKT. See also delay   times for other exchanges. All information provided ""as is"" for   informational purposes only, not intended for trading purposes or   advice. Neither Yahoo! nor any of independent providers is liable for   any informational errors, incompleteness, or delays, or for any   actions taken in reliance on information contained herein. By   accessing the Yahoo! site, you agree not to redistribute the   information found therein. Fundamental company data provided by Capital IQ. Historical chart data   and daily updates provided by Commodity Systems, Inc. (CSI).   International historical chart data, daily updates, fund summary, fund   performance, dividend data and Morningstar Index data provided by   Morningstar, Inc. Orderbook quotes are provided by BATS Exchange. US   Financials data provided by Edgar Online and all other Financials   provided by Capital IQ. International historical chart data, daily   updates, fundAnalyst estimates data provided by Thomson Financial   Network. All data povided by Thomson Financial Network is based solely   upon research information provided by third party analysts. Yahoo! has   not reviewed, and in no way endorses the validity of such data. Yahoo!   and ThomsonFN shall not be liable for any actions taken in reliance   thereon. Thus, yes there is a DB being accessed that there is likely an agreement between Yahoo! and the providers." I second @DumbCoder, every company seems to have its own way of displaying the next dividend date and the actual dividend. I keep track of this information and try my best to make it available for free through my little iphone web app here http://divies.nazabe.com I'm responsible for all our hedging.  Since we sell the energy to end users we do mostly fixed buys, swaps and calls.  I'm a excel guru and dabble a little in SQL.  we have Crystal Ball as well but i have no idea how to use it.  I guess I'm trying to figure out if there is a tool that people use to help me analyze the spreads. or perhaps some reading material to help me through this. This is what i've been working towards for so long and i really don't want to fuck this up Thanks for the answer/comments! The time-based method was something we mooted and something I almost went with. But just to wrap this up, the method we settled on was this: Every time there is an entry or exit into the fund, we divvy out any unrealised market profits/losses according to each person's profit share (based on % of the asset purchased at buy-in) JUST BEFORE the entry/exit. These realised profits are then locked in for those particpants, and then the unrealised profits/loss counter starts at zero, we do a fresh recalculation of shareholding after the entry/exit, and then we start again. Hope this helps anyone with the same issue!