Investments

Investments shows what you hold, what it is worth, and — first of all — whether those figures can be trusted. A security account holds units: shares, units in a fund, or a currency. Buys, sells, dividends and returns of capital are recorded through the Stock Transaction sheet, which works out the cost basis and any gain for you.

Can I trust today's figures?

The band at the top answers that in one number: the share of your holdings' value that is priced as of the market's most recent trading day. Value, not count — one large holding left behind matters more than several small ones.

• A holding is current when it is priced on the latest day its market traded, so a Friday close still counts as current on a Monday.
• Needs attention lists only what a person has to act on, with the fix beside it. On a healthy book it is not there at all.
• Missing days inside a period you held something are called out separately: those are the ones that make past valuations wrong.

Holdings

• Each row shows the units you hold and what you paid for them, then what they are worth now, the return since you bought, and how old the price is.
• Price History in the toolbar sets the period every small chart covers — a month through five years. The period is named above the first group, and remembered with the book.
• Every chart uses the same time axis, so the same position means the same date on every row: a line that stops short of the right-hand edge is one whose prices stop there.
• A break in the line means missing prices — it is never drawn through days that have none. What counts as a break scales with the period, so a week's absence shows over a month and not over five years.
• Heights are not comparable between rows. Each chart uses its own scale, because two securities' prices have no common measure.
• Valued by hand collects securities no price service covers, such as super funds. They are not failures; enter their prices from More ▸ Enter a Price…, and set how often you expect a new figure with Valuation Cadence… on the row — quarterly by default, so a fund is not called stale every Tuesday the market trades.
• Closed positions are hidden. Show them from More ▸ Show Closed Positions; their history is always kept for capital gains.

One security's page

Click any holding to open everything about it on one page: what it is worth now and what it cost, how it has performed, its whole price history as a chart, your own transactions, your open tax lots, every recorded price, and its settings.

• The chart draws your book on the market. The line is the price; green triangles are your buys and red diamonds your sells, each placed at what you actually paid or received; the dashed line is your average cost; the shaded band is the period you held it.
• A marker above the line is a purchase made above the market of the day, and one below it a bargain — which is what the chart is for.
• While held is the period that judges your own decisions. Everything before you bought is somebody else's story.
• Prices is the only price table in the app, and it shows where each price came from — a quote provider, or typed by hand. Click any figure to correct it; a corrected price is recorded as typed, because it is.
• Export… writes this security's prices as a CSV you can open in a spreadsheet and import back.
• Update in the toolbar fetches only this security. Rebuild History from Scratch replaces its prices — but only if the fetch returns data, so a failed run can never wipe good history.

Company data

A security's page can also show who and what the company is, its financial statements, and the dividends the issuer declared. This is fetched and cached on your device, never stored in your book — clearing it from Settings ▸ Pricing loses nothing.

• Every section says where it came from and when, and offers Refetch — a figure you doubt should never need waiting out.
• A section that cannot be filled says so plainly. Company data is a bonus, not a requirement: prices come from a different service and are unaffected.
• If you have set an API key, that service is asked before the keyless default — it is a documented service you signed up to. Yahoo covers everything without a key, so nothing is required of you.
• A bond shows its coupon, frequency, maturity, call date and yield instead — a better profile than any share service could give.
• Declared dividends are what the issuer paid per unit. What your book recorded is under Your transactions, and the difference is the next section.

Checks

Checks compares what the issuer declared against what your book records — a job that needs both the ledger and the market, so no portfolio tracker and no accounting package can do it alone. Nothing is ever changed for you.

• A declared dividend that is not in your book means income — and tax — is understated.
• Income with no matching declaration is usually a special dividend, sometimes a wrong date or the wrong security.
• An amount that differs points at withholding, franking, or a reinvestment recorded at the wrong price.
• A split that was never recorded is the quiet one: every price before that date disagrees with the units you held, so past valuations and the whole chart are wrong.
• A price far from the ones around it catches a decimal slip or a figure typed in cents — the errors most likely to hide in hand-entered prices.

Identifiers

Settings on a security's page hold two identifiers, and they do different jobs. Quote symbol overrides the ticker sent to a price provider — set it when a security trades under a different code than its name here. ISIN or exchange code identifies the security itself; providers that key by identifier rather than ticker, as bond services do, need it to find your holding at all.

Updating prices

• Update Prices (⇧⌘U) fills in everything missing, including gaps in the middle of a history.
• The arrow beside it sets what a run covers — all holdings, only what is behind, or holdings plus closed positions with gaps. A closed position is not worth today's price, but a hole inside the period you did hold it makes every past valuation wrong, so it is worth fetching once.
• Preview This Run… shows what will happen before it happens: which securities, which providers, and how many requests. Some providers answer for a whole group in one request, so the count of securities is not the cost.
• The same menu chooses a different provider for one run.
• Yahoo and Stooq need no key; EODHD, Alpha Vantage, Finnhub and Twelve Data take a free API key, set in Settings ▸ Pricing.
• Keys are kept in your keychain on this device — never in the book file.

Bonds

A corporate bond has no ticker, so no share-price service can find it. FIIG prices Australian corporate bonds by ISIN instead, needs no key, and is chosen per security — so one update run can serve your shares and your bonds at once.

• When a holding carries an ISIN, Needs attention offers to point it at FIIG. Choosing it changes nothing but which service is asked; no price moves until the next update.
• Bond prices are recorded relative to face value — 0.985 means the bond is worth 98.5% of its face, which is how the market quotes it and how the book has always stored it.
• FIIG publishes today's price and no past series, so a bond's history builds up from each day's update rather than arriving all at once.
• A bond FIIG does not list is reported by name after an update, rather than silently skipped. Usually the ISIN needs correcting on that security's page.

Exchange rates

A holding priced in another currency needs a rate before it can be valued in yours. The rates line says whether every currency you use has one, and Add Rate… fills a gap.

Watching and targets

More ▸ Watch Security… follows something you do not own. Right-click any row to set a price target, and the dashboard tells you when the latest quote crosses it.

Dividends and franking

Record Dividend… books the cash and, where it applies, the franking credits — so the tax reports have what they need at the end of the year.