Introduction
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This is Ken Leoni Vice President of Marketing here at Stock Rover. This video will provide an overview of Stock Rover’s Portfolio facility.
Stock Rover maintains historical positional information so that we can track portfolio performance over time. A position is an individual investment consisting of a stock, ETF, or mutual fund, along with the number of shares, and the average purchase prices for the shares.
I’ll start by showing you how to get your portfolio or portfolios into Stock Rover. Then I’ll show you how to display portfolio detail in the Table, then I’ll finish with a look into Stock Rover’s portfolio analytics. Please note that most of the features shown in this video require a Stock Rover Premium subscription.
Managing Portfolios
To get your portfolio or portfolios into Stock Rover you’ll want to go to Portfolio Management. This is found under the Management group in the grey selector bar on the left. I have already selected a Dividend Growers portfolio.
When I switch to Portfolio Management, we’ll see 3 panes displayed. Portfolios is where we select the portfolio we would like to manage once they’ve been created. I can also right-click for additional portfolio management options. Portfolio Actions provides shortcuts to portfolio functions as well as quick access to Help Topics specific to portfolios. The Portfolio pane is where we can adjust portfolio holdings. Along the top, we see a number of options for analyzing portfolios which we’ll dive into a little later.
Creating Portfolios
There are a number of options to create your portfolio in Stock Rover. We’ll select Create a New Portfolio from Portfolio Actions. Again, we can right-click in the navigation pane as well for portfolio functions. We see here we have a number of options available to us. We can connect to a brokerage, we can enter positions manually, enter transactions manually, as well as import our holdings from a file.
Let’s start with Connect to your brokerage. Connect to your brokerage is where you can establish a read-only connection between Stock Rover and your brokerage house. The brokerage integration services provide daily snapshots of your portfolio’s holdings.
When you initially connect to your brokerage, the brokerage returns your current positions, as of the date of your initial connection, once your brokerage is linked Stock Rover will receive the updates going forward. You can optionally import portfolio history via Stock Rover’s Import Updates feature. Stock Rover keeps the positions in your brokerage account in sync with positions in the corresponding Stock Rover portfolio. This is done automatically every night and whenever you log in to Stock Rover.
Connecting your Stock Rover account to your brokerage house is the easiest way to keep your portfolios up to date.
Importing Portfolios
You don’t have to connect Stock Rover to your brokerages to create a portfolio in Stock Rover. You can simply import your portfolio holdings from an export from your brokerage.
Import holdings from file is where you can choose to import my portfolio positions as of a specific date. The portfolio import file should have the headings ticker and quantity. It can also have a price column. If the price column exists, it will be used for the cost basis. If it is omitted, the closing price for the stock, ETF or fund as of the import date will be used as the cost basis.
I am going to import my position as of November 8th. I’ll select the import file, rename the portfolio, and import. We now see My Portfolio listed under Portfolios The Portfolio pane now shows our positions as of today. When I select Transactions, we see that Stock Rover inferred the buy transactions necessary to create the positions.
Stock Rover has the ability to backcast a portfolio, meaning that if you import a portfolio for a specific date, it will assume the same holdings going back in time from the selected position import date. You can then chart and generate analytics on performance for the portfolio for time periods earlier than your position import date. Backcasting works well when portfolios haven’t changed or have experienced minimal change prior to the import date. If a portfolio has changed a lot prior to the position import date, backcasting is less useful. Backcasting can be turned off here.
Updating Portfolios
When you initially connect to your brokerage, the brokerage returns your current positions, as of the date of your initial connection, once your brokerage is linked Stock Rover will receive the updates going forward. You can optionally import portfolio history via Stock Rover’s Import Updates feature.
We have imported our portfolio as of November the 8th. Let’s say we now have portfolio detail from an earlier brokerage statement. Here is what my portfolio looked like on May 3rd – 10 shares of Google, 30 of Amazon, and 200 of Apple. Let’s change our position date to May the 3rd. Let’s execute our import.
I’ll select May 3rd as my position date then the Import button to import updates to the portfolio. We can see our current positions haven’t changed. Let’s take a look at transactions. Here we see that Stock Rover inferred the buy and sell transactions necessary to create the positions. We have 125 shares of Apple. We filter on Apple, we see there were 200 shares in May, so 75 shares had to be sold to get to the 125.
Note in the positions tab we can edit the existing position for a given date by first selecting the date we want to make a change on and then by selecting the tickers we want to change. We can change quantity, we can change cost, we can also delete positions. Similarly, we can manipulate the underlying transactions and Stock Rover will infer the necessary changes to the positions. Again, we can edit quantity, buy price. Note that Stock Rover uses the close price as the selling price. Stock Rover doesn’t capture the gains made from day-trading or from selling at a better price than the closing price. The portfolio analytics still tend to be very accurate as missed gains or losses tend to average out. Because the brokerage integration services just provide daily snapshots of a portfolio’s holdings Stock Rover is designed around that convenient use case.
Let’s make another change, let’s say we’ve an IRA with a single holding and we just want to add it to this portfolio for tracking, it is an ETF we purchased in June. Let’s change our position date to June, and we’ll pick the 14th and let’s add a ticker. We’ll add an ETF. We’ll add QQQ and we had $6,000 worth of QQQ, let’s save.
As we want to carry the $6,000 of QQQ forward through today, I’ll select merge, and as we’ll see QQQ will show up as a position. If I selected the only 6/14 date then the position would not carry forward. An example where you’d want to use the only date would be if today’s positions are correct but you want to have better history by filling in the real buy date. You could choose an earlier date and enter a few positions that are still held today. As we can see QQQ is now carried forward to today.
Selecting a Portfolio and Displaying Performance
Let’s take a look at a slightly different portfolio, the Dividend Growers Strategy portfolio. You’ll note that the Portfolio Manager also displays the portfolio allocation along with the top holdings. I can see Asset Allocation, Sector Allocation, and World Regions breakdown.
Stock Rover comes with a number of model portfolios, which you can select from and import into your account via the Stock Rover Investor Library. To do this, simply select Library from the Grey navigation menu and then select portfolios, then find the portfolio or portfolios you are interested in and import them. I’ll search for growth. Here I can import selected portfolios. Also, note that portfolios that have already been imported are lightly shaded, as we can see here with the Dividend Growers Strategy which we just looked at.
The simplest and quickest to see portfolio performance is to first select Table mode in the grey navigation bar, and then simply click on the portfolio you want to display from the navigation panel. You will want to select the Portfolio Performance view. For a detailed explanation of the metrics being displayed simply go to the column heading and select explain.
The summary row in the table is normally computed by weighting all tickers in the table equally. However, if the table is showing a portfolio as is the case here, the weighting of each ticker is based on the size of the holding of that ticker relative to the size of the overall portfolio. To further research the portfolio’s holdings simply toggle to a different view in the Table. I’ll pick a dividends view.
If I change to All mode, in addition to the Table, I can see both Chart and detailed Insight information for each of the portfolio holdings. You’ll note that both the Chart and the Insight panel march in lockstep when I step through the tickers.
Let’s go back Portfolio Management to explore more portfolio-specific capabilities. Note you have additional options available to you via right-click in the navigation pane. Along the top you’ll see a number of options that are available to you. I can shortcut to the Table. I can chart a portfolio against a benchmark. I can baseline the benchmark. Here are examples of the benchmarks that are available to you. I can even benchmark portfolios against each other.
I can analyze a portfolio. I can look at value over time. Notice you have a user-selectable date range. I can see risk and reward, and look at holdings detail. We can even select multiple portfolios. Here I’ll sort by percent of total return. We can perform correlation, again you have a user-selectable date range. Here we picked 3 months.
We can determine expected future dividend Income. Here we have at the holdings level. If I select multiple portfolios, I can get it at the portfolio level.
We can also perform trade planning and rebalancing exercises. We can change our holdings based on quantity or based percentage. There are additional allocation options as well as the ability to save the model as a new portfolio.
Summary
I hope you found the video useful. I encourage you to explore Stock Rover and see all that it has to offer, as well as check out our other educational videos on our website. Thank you for watching.
