You imported your holdings into a portfolio tracker, and it told you what they are worth. Then you asked it a different question: if every open position hit its stop tomorrow, how much of the account goes with them. The tracker had no answer, because it was never asked to store a stop price.
That gap is structural rather than cosmetic. A tracker built around holdings records what you own. A tracker built around trades records what you own, what you planned to do with it, and what it costs you if the plan fails.
Why a generic portfolio tracker falls short for swing traders
It is built around a holding, not a multi-day position
A holdings tracker reports total return over months or years. A swing trade has a narrower shape: an entry on a date, a thesis, a stop price, and an intended exit inside a few weeks.
Recording it as a holding drops the fields that let you grade it afterwards. Was the entry where you planned it? Did the stop hold? Did the exit reach the target, or did you take the money early?
It has no concept of open risk
Portfolio heat is the total capital at risk across open positions. Take the distance from entry to stop, multiply by the units still open, sum across positions, and divide by portfolio value. Five open positions, each risking 2% of capital, put 5 x 2% = 10% of the account at risk.
Unrealised profit and loss answers a different question. It says what the positions are worth now against what you paid. Heat says what they are worth if every stop fills. A tracker with no stop field cannot compute the second number at all, whatever it does with the first.
It cannot separate one strategy from another
Run a breakout system and a mean-reversion system out of the same account and the combined return tells you about the pair, not about either. A month where the two offset each other reads as flat, and flat is the one result that contains no information about which to keep.
Separating them needs a strategy attached to each trade and metrics filtered by it.
It handles partial exits badly or not at all
Scaling out is ordinary in swing trading. Buy 500 units, sell 200 at the first target, move the stop to the entry price, and let the rest run. A tracker that treats the partial sale as a separate, unrelated trade averages the two legs into figures that describe neither, and the trade history stops matching what happened.
Its tax reporting assumes one sale per position
Frequent trading multiplies the work. Holding periods run per lot rather than per symbol, partial exits split a position across two treatments, and the rules themselves differ by jurisdiction. A report built for an investor who sells a holding once does not have the shape for that.
What swing traders need from a portfolio tracker
Open risk you can see without doing the arithmetic
Every open position with a stop should feed a running total of capital at risk, shown as a percentage of portfolio value and broken down by position. Calculate it by hand first with the portfolio heat calculator so you know what the number means before a screen shows it to you.
The limit is yours to set. The point of the figure is that it is known before you place the next order, not reconstructed afterwards.
More than one portfolio
Traders run separate accounts for different reasons: a primary brokerage, a second account for a different strategy, accounts with different brokers for different markets. Each needs its own cash balance, transaction history and metrics, with a combined view when you want one.
How many accounts a tracker supports is often a pricing question rather than a capability. Sharesight's Australian pricing page sets its limits out by plan. The Free and Basic plans each cover one portfolio, Standard covers "2-4 separate portfolios", and Premium covers "5-10 portfolios" (fetched 12 September 2026). Check that against the number of accounts you run before you compare anything else. The Sharesight alternative page puts the two side by side.
Performance filtered by strategy
Each trade links to a strategy. You then filter win rate, average R-multiple, expectancy and the equity curve by that strategy and compare one against another over the same period.
Trade-level detail
A position line of "500 units" is the start of the record, not the record. Four fields make a trade gradeable afterwards: the entry price and date, the stop price, the target, and the resulting R-multiple. Add each partial exit with its own price and date, plus notes carrying your reasoning.
Reporting that matches your tax jurisdiction
Australian capital gains tax has a 50% discount that turns on the holding period. The tax rules differ from the United States treatment of short-term and long-term gains and wash sales. Either way the report has to work from your own dates and units, including partial exits where two lots of one symbol fall under different treatments.
How to evaluate a portfolio tracker
Seven questions, each answerable in a trial account.
Does it hold more than one portfolio, with independent cash balances? Check the plan limit as well as the feature.
Does it store a stop price and total open risk from it? Without a stop field there is no heat figure, and no way to add one later.
Does it record per-trade outcomes? Entry, exit, stop, R-multiple, holding period. Portfolio-level return alone cannot grade a trade.
Can a trade be assigned to a strategy and the results filtered by it?
Does it handle a partial exit as part of the same position? Sell part of a holding in the trial and look at what the trade history says afterwards.
Does it import a CSV from your broker, and does the import let you map your own column names? Broker export formats differ, so a fixed importer covers fewer brokers than a mapper does.
Does it report under your own tax jurisdiction? Australian capital gains with the 50% discount and United States wash sales are different report shapes. Check which ones the tool produces.
How Swingfolio handles this
Swingfolio records trades rather than holdings, and the surfaces below follow from that.
Open risk on the Positions page. While the open view is showing, a panel above the table carries a gauge and six figures. They read Positions, with a count of how many carry stops, then Portfolio Value, Planned Risk, Actual Risk, Heat and Breached. The heat reading is labelled "Risk Under Control" below 6%, "Elevated Risk" from 6%, and "Excessive Risk!" from 10%. The Dashboard's performance card carries the same reading as a Portfolio Heat tile, in a row that also holds an Open Risk tile. There is no per-strategy heat figure.
Allocation on a portfolio's own page. An "Allocation Breakdown" card splits the open positions three ways, through tabs reading By Sector, By Ticker and By Exchange. That is the concentration view. On the analytics page, once five trades are closed, a separate "Sector P&L" card is a different measurement: it charts realised profit and loss per sector across closed trades, not current exposure.
R-multiples on the analytics page. An "Average R-Multiple" card prints the mean and the median across your closed trades. A "Low sample" badge sits in the card's header until 20 closed trades carry a computable R-multiple, after which the mean trims the most extreme 5% at each end. An "R-Multiple Distribution" card shows the spread the average came from. A sticky strip above both carries Win %, PF, Expect, Trades, Avg Hold and FX Impact. Read that strip as an account-wide summary: the date and strategy filters below it change the charts, not the strip or the average R. A portfolio filter joins them once you have more than one portfolio.
Australian CGT. For an AU account, the Tax Report page prints a summary reading Capital gains, Capital losses, Net capital gain, 50% CGT discount and Taxable capital gain. A note under it states that capital losses are offset against gains before the discount applies. Below that, each disposal is listed with the days it was held, and a "50%" badge marks the rows that qualify. The eligibility test is a calendar anniversary rather than a day count: the disposal has to fall after the twelve-month anniversary of the purchase. For a US account the report switches to cost basis, proceeds, an adjustment code and wash-sale matches. This article is general information and not tax advice.
CSV import. A six-step wizard runs Upload, Review required, Matched closes, Open positions, Reconcile cash and Save. The upload step reads the header row and proposes a mapping to ticker, date, price, quantity and fees. A file of already-matched closed trades maps instead to entry and exit date, entry and exit price, units and fees. Every mapping stays editable before anything is written. It takes a CSV or an Excel file from any broker that exports one. Importing a CSV is part of the 30-day trial. The read-only broker connection is the part sold with Premium, and it is not switched on.
That connection is off for paying subscribers too, so the CSV path is the one that works today.
Questions swing traders ask about portfolio trackers
What is portfolio heat and why does it matter?
Portfolio heat is the share of trading capital at risk across all open positions. Work it out by taking the distance from entry to stop for each open trade, multiplying by the units still open, summing those amounts and dividing by total capital.
It answers one question: what the account is worth if every stop fills on the same day. That makes it the figure that decides whether there is room for another position, and it is knowable before you take one. Swingfolio labels its own reading "Elevated Risk" from 6% and "Excessive Risk!" from 10%; your own ceiling is a decision you make rather than a fact about markets. Work out yours with the portfolio heat calculator.
Can I track several broker accounts in one place?
Yes, where the tracker supports more than one portfolio. Set each broker account up as its own portfolio with its own cash balance and transaction history, then read them separately or combined.
This matters when you run different strategies in different accounts, or use one broker for Australian equities and another for United States markets.
How does a trading portfolio tracker differ from an investment tracker?
An investment tracker answers "what is this worth and how has it grown", from holdings, dividends and total return.
A trading tracker answers a different set: how much risk is open right now, which strategy is ahead, what the average R-multiple is this month, whether the position sizes match the plan. It assumes each position has a defined entry, exit and risk level, and that how you manage the trade drives the result.
Which portfolio metrics do swing traders track?
Beyond total return and win rate:
- Portfolio heat, as a percentage of capital
- The R-multiple distribution, to see whether winners outrun losers in risk-adjusted terms
- Expectancy, the average result per trade
- Win rate per strategy rather than blended
- Average holding period
- Sector and ticker concentration
- Drawdown, the largest peak-to-trough fall in the equity curve
In Swingfolio the R-multiple, expectancy, win rate, holding period and drawdown figures sit on the analytics screen, which the portfolio analytics page describes. Heat sits on the Positions page and the Dashboard. Concentration lives on each portfolio's own page, in the Allocation Breakdown card.
Where to start
Open your current tracker and try to answer one question from it: how much of your account is at risk right now across every open position. If the answer takes a spreadsheet, or the tracker has nowhere to store a stop price, that is the gap, and no amount of extra reporting closes it.
Import a month of trades, log the next five with their stops, and read the heat figure before you take the sixth. Start the 30-day trial.