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Posts: 82
I am relatively new to investing with an account at IG. I am finding it difficult to keep a track of the information I am collecting on holdings and watch lists – not just the numbers but targets, comments from sites like Stockopedia, Investors Chronical, reports on research Tree and my thoughts and notes on positions too. At the moment I seem to be looking up the same stuff again and again. I need to keep a journal each day which is searchable to gather all the notes data and comments in one place on each share. Do others on here do that and if so, what do you use? I am not looking for an Excel spreadsheet but a diary where links, text and anything else can be stored like in a searchable database. Help please. Chris
Posts: 82
Thanks for looking at this post but sadly no comments. What do you record each day on your portfolio and watch lists? Nothing, just prices, future intentions, frustrations, learnings, the weather - what? ...and how do you do it - text, package etc? I am sure many would be most interested to know.
Posts: 414
Crescendo,
From my limited experience here it’s a kind of dog eat dog world. Very few will give sensible advice or help …plenty encourage you to buy/ramp a share call it what you will. Some of the posts are informative but all seem to end in anonymous people hurling insults at one another!
I use Barclays Smart investor to track my investments. I’ve found some of the you tube videos helpful, but there are a lot just promoting their own ego !
Good luck….
Posts: 82
Many thanks for your response TD. I absolutely agree re this site and ADVFN too - mostly people sounding off. I use Stockopedia which is worth every penny many times over.
As I have said I am sure everyone reads stuff about the shares in their positions and watch lists especially when considering whether to hold or sell. My aim is to gather all that data in one place plus my learning and thoughts in a diarised journal which is searchable by word. That way I look this stuff up only once and tag it in my journal. Anyway I have a couple of packages in mind and am going to give it a go. Much better than looking the same stuff up time and time again. Happy investing Chris
Posts: 735
Crescendo. Welcome to my world! . I don’t think there is a bespoke tool that does what you want. I use excel to record purchases and sells. I just use a note book to record brief notes. Occasionally I take screen shots of articles I read.
Posts: 1,227
Crescendo, I too record portfolio performance and have done for more than 40 years. Since 2012, these have been recorded in electronic format on a spreadsheet, and prior to that in a ledger. Since my portfolio has completely changed in the last 10 years and bears little relationship to the formative years, paper ledgers have no benefit other than the statistical summary for each year.
What is much more useful is to use the information collected so that I have a pretty good idea of how my finances are expected to behave based on deeper analysis of monthly performance. The adage of “sell in May” no longer works following the ascendency of A dealing.
My base target is to beat the market. My secondary target is to achieve a minimum of 12.5% growth annually and further broken down so that there is weighting based on historic monthly movement consistent with broad patterns.
With linked spreadsheets I am able, not only to forecast portfolio growth to monitor results against forecast for many years ahead, but also future years use the historic data. I also know that on a rolling 6 year period my typical return will have 3 normal years, one terrible year and 2 great years.
2021 was forecast to be a great year (and is proving so), 2022 an average one and 2023 a poor year (5% growth including reinvested dividends).
Spreadsheets allow for marginal notes to be made…. I record world events that have dramatic effect (terrorism at World Trade Center, recent market collapse in Feb / March 2020, announcement of viable vaccine, election of Biden as President) as these either change market direction or investor sentiment.
Insofar as a database is concerned, I am not aware of one, but spreadsheets are designed for the manipulation of numbers. Databases would not necessarily provide any better, different or greater information, but in this instance, spreadsheets are more efficient and plenty of secondary information can be found in csv or xls format