How it works

Transactions, positions and how current value is computed.

The Live Tracker is a free tool for monitoring the performance of your real portfolio. You record purchases, sales, recurring plans and dividends; it computes current value and the metrics: total return, CAGR, TWR, Sharpe.

The model: transactions, not balances

The Live Tracker doesn't ask what your portfolio is worth today. It asks what you did, and derives the value. That's an important difference: from a list of transactions you can reconstruct every historical metric; from a balance you cannot.

Each row is one of four things:

TypeEffect
BuyIncreases units, recalculates average cost, increases invested capital
SellReduces units, leaves the average cost of remaining units unchanged
DCAA recurring purchase, with the same mechanics as a buy
DividendRecords income received, without changing units

How current value is computed

For each holding: units held × latest available price. Summed across holdings, that's the portfolio's current value.

Invested capital is instead the total you actually contributed, net of sales. The difference between the two is total gain.

Average cost basis

Average cost is the weighted mean of the prices you bought at:

Avg cost=i(qi×pi)iqi\text{Avg cost} = \frac{\sum_{i}(q_i \times p_i)}{\sum_{i} q_i}

It's recalculated on every purchase, including units already held. On a partial sale, however, the average cost of remaining units stays as it was: selling doesn't change the price you paid for what's still in your hands.

Stock splits

For stocks, splits are applied automatically. When a security splits, the Live Tracker adjusts average cost, unit count and the historical price series, so the performance curve stays continuous instead of showing an artificial jump.

On charts, splits are flagged with a dashed vertical line, so you know why the series changes scale at that point.

Multiple portfolios

You can keep several separate portfolios and analyse them one at a time. The most useful split is the one that mirrors how you think about your money: by goal (retirement, house, emergency fund) rather than by broker, because allocation decisions happen at the goal level.

Why an account is needed

Transactions are saved server-side and linked to your account: that's what lets you find them from any device without re-entering them. What gets stored, how it's encrypted and what you're never asked for is documented in Privacy and security.