Tracking your investment portfolio
Cash accounts hold one number. Investment accounts hold positions, and positions have prices with opinions of their own.
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.
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.
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, an index fund symbol by default. 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.
Manual and synced coexist
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.