Introduction
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This is Ken Leoni, Vice President of Marketing at Stock Rover.
In this video, we’ll show how to create and update manual portfolios. We’ll also demonstrate Stock Rover’s backcasting capability. Backcasting makes it possible to analyze your portfolio and to view its historical performance prior to the date the portfolio was initially created. Lastly, we’ll show how portfolio assets are handled. Assets are holdings that Stock Rover is not able to price. Examples include tickers from foreign exchanges, options, and bonds. Assets allow you to track the value of holdings in a portfolio that are not traded in markets that Stock Rover covers.
Creating a Manual Portfolio
Let’s start with an explanation of what a manual portfolio is. As the name implies, a manual portfolio is a portfolio that’s manually maintained by you in Stock Rover. You create the portfolio and then update it when you want to add, update, or remove holdings. Manual portfolios can be actual portfolios you own, and they can be hypothetical portfolios for investment research purposes.
For example, you could use a manual portfolio as a model portfolio to benchmark against other portfolios. Let’s go to portfolios.
Manual portfolios show with a different icon than linked portfolios which are portfolios linked to brokerages. Linked portfolios are covered in quite a bit more detail in a separate video.
To create a manual portfolio, we can either select create a new portfolio under portfolio actions or we can right click on the portfolio folder and select create new portfolio. We see four options. The first option is specific to linked portfolios, which is not applicable here. For manual portfolios, we can create them by entering positions, entering transactions or importing portfolio holdings from a file.
Let’s briefly discuss positions and transactions. Stock Rover’s portfolio tracking is position based. A portfolio position is an individual investment consisting of a stock, ETF, or mutual fund, along with the number of shares owned and the average purchase price for the shares. For each portfolio, Stock Rover maintains a record of the positions held for the portfolio at the end of each trading day.
Although is position based, Stock Rover supports portfolio transactions. Transactions provide an audit trail showing why your position has changed. Underlying buy and sell transactions are inferred based on the change in positions. You can optionally enter individual buy and sell transactions, and they will be used to compute new positions.
Let’s create a portfolio by entering positions. We’ll start by giving the portfolio a name. We’ll call it My Model Portfolio. We’ll pick a data record, which is when we first held positions in this portfolio. We’ll pick January 24th, 2024. Our first position is Apple.
We purchased 100 shares.
Note, the cost per share will be our current price if the date of record is today, or the closed price for an earlier date of record. We can adjust the cost per share to reflect the actual buy price. Our second position is Microsoft.
Let’s enter a quantity of 50. Let’s save.
We now see our current positions.
Let’s go to the transactions tab. We see the two buy transactions that were inferred to create the positions. If you’ve many holdings, you can create a portfolio by importing the holdings from a file. We’ll go back to Create New Portfolio. We’ll select Import Holdings from a File.
We have a number of options. We can select to import our positions as of a specific date. We can also import based on ticker. quantity and by date. This option allows us to import buy and sell transactions across multiple dates and Stock Rover will infer the positions. We can also import from a Stock Rover portfolio export.
You can export a portfolio and save it with its full history and later import it. We’ll import our holdings as of a specific date. First, let’s take a quick look at the file format. We can see that we have a column for ticker. Quantity and Cost. Note the cost per share is optional. If we don’t specify a cost per share, the close price as of the date of record will be used.
We’ll select June 7th, 2023 as our date of record.
Let’s browse to our file.
We’ll select it and import it.
The Transaction tab is showing the buy transactions that were inferred to create the positions.
Clicking on the Positions tab shows our portfolio’s positions. For each position, we see quantity, average cost per share, the cost basis, the current price, the value, the gain, and the percent of portfolio. If we need to make a quick adjustment to a position, we can simply edit the cell. For example, let’s adjust the cost per share for Apple.
Note, when we make the change, the cost basis and the gain will change.
Let’s save.
Updating a Manual Portfolio
Once a manual portfolio is created, we may want to update the portfolio to reflect a change in holdings or to add history. We can edit the portfolio directly in the Portfolio Manager or we can import the updates using a file. To update the portfolio, we’ll select our portfolio and launch the Portfolio Manager.
We’ll select a date of record of June 7th, 2023.
In the Positions tab, we can add positions. We can also modify an existing position. We can change the quantity, the cost per share, and the cost basis. We can also remove positions. Let’s go to the Transactions tab. We can select Add Trade to add transactions. We select a ticker, the date of record, whether we’re executing a buy or a sell transaction, and then the appropriate transaction values.
Clicking Add allows us to add another transaction for that date of record. We’ll click Add and Finish when we’ve completed all the transactions for that date of record.
We can also update the existing transactions. We can adjust the quantity, the buy price, the amount of the transaction, and the balance, which is the current quantity after the sell or buy of that transaction. We can also delete transactions. Let’s update a transaction. For Amazon, we see we bought 150 shares.
Let’s change that to 125. Notice the amount and the balance will change.
Let’s save.
When we go to the positions tab, we see our quantity has changed, along with the cost basis, the value, the gain, and the percent of portfolio.
Remember, when you update positions, Stock Rover will infer the buy and sell transactions. And, when you update transactions, Stock Rover will infer the change in positions. When you have many positions to update, you’ll want to import using a file. The file will contain all portfolio positions as of a specific date of record.
As Stock Rover’s portfolios are positions based, it’s important that the import file contains all portfolio positions. For example, if the file being imported only contains a subset of your actual holdings, then Stock Rover will assume the missing holdings were sold. If you’re importing history, the best practice is to create a manual portfolio, starting from the oldest date of record, and then update proceeding forward chronologically.
Notice, this portfolio currently shows 100 shares of Meta and 75 shares of NVIDIA.
We’ll select our date of record as of January 22, 2024. Let’s click on Import and select the file with our positions.
Notice, Meta shows 50 instead of 100 shares, And NVIDIA shows 25 instead of 75 shares. So, we reduced our positions for these two holdings, and we’ve added new positions too. Let’s import.
We now see our new portfolio positions. When we select the Transactions tab, we see the Buy and Sell transactions that were inferred based on our new positions.
Backcasting
When you create a manual portfolio with no position history, you can always analyze the portfolio and view its historical performance via Stock Rover’s Backcasting feature. Backcasting shows the performance of holdings earlier than the first position date and can go all the way back to Stock Rover’s first date, which is January 1, 2007.
In that way, you can see what the performance of your portfolio was prior to your actual purchases. Backcasting works well when a portfolio hasn’t changed or has experienced minimal change. Backcasting is configured via the Portfolio Manager. In the Positions tab, we can see that Backcasting is enabled by default.
This portfolio was established on June 7th. Selecting Explain shows a brief explanation and also allows us to enable or disable backcasting for the selected portfolio. We’ll leave the backcasting enabled. Let’s go to the analytics. Here we see the dividend adjusted return and the value over time for this portfolio going back to April 12, 2019. Even though the portfolio was established on June 7th, 2023.
Assets
When you enter positions or transactions, the tickers are verified to make sure that they can be priced. If a position cannot be priced, you’ll need to enter the position as an asset. Assets allow you to track the value of holdings in a portfolio that are not traded in markets that Stock Rover supports.
Examples include tickers from foreign exchanges, options, and bonds. Other examples of assets you can enter into portfolios include items like real estate or commodities. To add an asset, we’ll select a portfolio and launch the Portfolio Manager.
In the Positions tab, we see an Add Other Assets button. Let’s select it.
We’re going to be adding an option, but again there are a number of categories. We’ll first specify an identifier. We’ll enter a quantity, a unit cost, and we’ll also add a description. We’ll Add and Finish. We now see our option at the end of the alphabetical list of our positions. Let’s save.
Let’s go to the table.
In the table, we’ll see at the bottom, a summary line for our assets.
Let’s expand Assets. Here we’ll see more detail on our asset or assets, that we’ve added to this portfolio.
Getting Help
For help on portfolios, under your username, select Help. Scroll down to Portfolios and select it. Here you’ll find well documented portfolio help.
Summary
I hope you found this video useful. I encourage you to explore Stock Rover and see all that it has to offer, as well as check out our educational videos on our website. Thank you for watching.
