Tracking your investment portfolio

How investment accounts work

An Investment account carries two layers: a cash balance, which behaves like any account, and holdings, positions in securities with quantities and prices. The account shows all three figures, Cash Balance, Holdings Value and Total Value, and it is the total that flows into your net worth and the accounts grand total. The account page splits into Holdings, Security Activity and Cash tabs, with buys, sells and their linked cash movements recorded as security transactions.

Shares that came from elsewhere

Not every holding starts with a buy. Shares moved from another broker, received as a gift or from an employee plan go in as an Add, which puts the units in the account without touching your cash. Give the Add a Cost / Share, what those units originally cost, and your gain is measured from that. Leave it blank and those units carry no cost of their own: a holding made only of such units shows its whole value as gain. The cost field is in the transaction dialog on the web, and editing the Add later in the mobile app keeps the cost you entered.

Securities and prices

The Securities page is the registry of everything you hold or watch: Add Security by symbol, and each row shows the last price with its date. Symbol-tracked securities update their prices automatically from market data, which is what keeps your holdings value and net worth moving between your own transactions; custom securities, marked with a Custom Asset badge, take their prices from you. A stale price date on a security is the first thing to check when a holdings value looks frozen, and on a custom security the fix is entering a fresh price rather than waiting.

On the web, a price quoted in pence, as most London-listed shares and funds are, shows in pence, for example 80.22p, the way UK brokers quote it. Market values, costs and totals are never shown in pence. When you record a trade in such a security on the web, enter the price per share in pence; the total beside it is in pounds.

Measuring performance

The Investment Portfolio Performance report plots your portfolio's value and returns over time and compares them against a benchmark of your choosing. By default that is an accumulating S&P 500 fund quoted in the currency your report is shown in, so the benchmark line carries its dividends the same way your return carries yours, and the currency move sits on both sides or neither. Type any symbol to compare against something else. The comparison is the unforgiving mirror of investing: it answers not just "did I gain?" but "did I gain more than doing nothing would have?", which is the question that separates strategy from luck.

Performance figures separate what the market did from what you did. Money you pay in or take out is a contribution or a withdrawal; a dividend, interest, a rebate or a fee is part of the return. When you enter one of those by hand on an investment account, the transaction dialog shows an Investment return box, ticked for you when the category says dividend, interest, or a fee, and left clear for a contribution. Tick or untick it as you see fit; the figures follow the box, not the category name. A brokerage connection sets it on every row it writes.

Shares count the same way. An Add or Remove you enter is money in or out at the day's value. On an account connected to a broker, the adjustments the connection makes to match the broker's holdings are bookkeeping, so they are not counted as money in or out; shares your broker reports as transferred in or out are.

What next

Brokerage syncing has its own guide, and for the long view your portfolio feeds FIRE planning, where growth assumptions meet the question of when work becomes optional.