Your broker screen shows what you hold right now. It does not show what you held in March, what your stop was when you opened the position, why you took it, or how the last forty trades performed as a group. Portfolio tracking is the record that answers those, and it has to be built deliberately because no broker builds it for you.
What tracking gives you that a broker screen does not
Four things go missing without a record of your own.
Your true exposure, because a broker groups by account rather than by the risk you took. Your performance measurement, because a broker reports the account balance and not the P&L per trade after fees and currency conversion. Your closed-trade history, because the trades you want to analyse sit in old statements rather than on a positions screen. And your tax position, which has to be assembled from a year of those statements if you have not kept it as you go.
What to track
Position information
For each open position, record:
- Symbol in
TICKER.EXCHANGEform, soBHP.AUnever gets confused with a US listing - Entry date and entry price
- Current price and units held
- Position value
- Stop level and target level
- Unrealized P&L
- The position as a percentage of the portfolio
The last one is the field people skip and then regret. A position that has run is a bigger share of the account than it was at entry, and the percentage is what tells you.
Portfolio-level figures
Total value, cash balance, holdings value, total exposure across open positions, the change over the day and the month, and how the value splits across sectors.
Cash belongs in this list. It is not the leftover after positions. It is the part of the account deliberately not at risk, and its size is a decision you are making whether or not you look at it.
Performance figures
Return over the periods you review, win rate, profit factor, maximum drawdown, and a comparison against a benchmark index so you can tell your result from the market's.
Risk-adjusted figures such as the Sharpe or Sortino ratio compare return against the volatility that produced it. They need a run of periodic returns rather than a handful of trades, so they mean little early on.
Trade history
For every closed trade, keep:
- Entry and exit details
- P&L in money and in percentage terms
- R-multiple
- Holding period
- What you wrote at the time about why you took it and how it went
The notes are the part that decays fastest. A month later you will remember the outcome and not the reasoning.
Portfolio tracking tools
Broker platforms
Your broker holds the authoritative record of fills, fees and cash for that account, and it shows current prices. What it does not do is analytics beyond the account level, history across more than one broker, or any journaling.
Good for watching live positions. Not a performance record.
Spreadsheets
Free, entirely under your control, and shaped however you want. The costs are manual entry, prices that do not update themselves, and formula errors that survive for months because nothing checks them.
Workable while the trade count is small, and a growing time cost once it is not.
Dedicated tracking software
Imports the trade record, computes the metrics, and keeps the closed-trade history. You pay for it, and you spend an evening learning the layout.
Before trusting one, check two things: how it handles trades in a currency other than your account's, and whether fees are inside its P&L figures. Those are the two places where a total quietly stops matching your broker statement.
Swingfolio
Trades come in through a spreadsheet import. You upload a file exported from your broker and the importer reads the header row, mapping the columns it recognises. You map the rest. The wizard then walks the file through review, matched closes, open positions and cash reconciliation before saving anything.
From there each portfolio has its own screen. Across the top: total value, cash, holdings, unrealized and realized P&L, win rate, profit factor and expectancy.
Below that sit a value chart with your chosen benchmark drawn on it, monthly returns, monthly P&L, drawdown and an allocation breakdown. A Risk Metrics card carries max drawdown, Sharpe, Sortino, CAGR and Calmar. A Heat Map covers open positions and a Cash Utilization gauge covers the rest. Tabs beside them hold open positions, closed trades and cash transactions.
Nothing streams. Figures recalculate against your trade record when prices and trades update.
Practices worth keeping
1. Update on a fixed cadence
Pick an interval and hold it. Checking positions, noting which are near a stop or a target, and reading your sector exposure takes a few minutes when it is routine and half an hour when it has been a fortnight.
The interval matters less than the fact that it does not move with your mood.
2. Reconcile against the broker
Compare your record to the broker statement while both are still to hand. A missing fee or a wrong fill price is a two-minute fix in the week it happened and a forensic exercise at tax time.
3. Record every trade
Including the small ones, the losses, and the ones you would rather forget. A record with the embarrassing trades removed produces metrics that describe a trader who does not exist.
4. Use consistent categories
Fix your vocabulary once: your setup or strategy names, sector names, direction, and whatever else you segment by. Analysis by category only works when the same trade would get the same label today as it did last year.
5. Include fees and slippage
Commissions, spreads, and the gap between the price you wanted and the price you got. Each is small; together they are the difference between a system that clears its costs and one that does not.
In Swingfolio, entry and exit fees are stored in the portfolio's currency rather than the trade's. A foreign trade's net P&L is therefore the gross result converted at the trade's exchange rate, with fees subtracted afterwards.
6. Watch concentration
Set your own ceilings on a single position and on a single sector, then check the numbers against them rather than trusting your sense of the account.
Swingfolio's dashboard carries a Portfolio Heat reading for this. It sums the distance from entry to stop on each open position, multiplied by the units still held, and divides by portfolio value.
The question it answers is what you lose if every stop hits at once. Under 6% the gauge reads "Risk Under Control". From 6% it reads "Elevated Risk", and from 10% it reads "Excessive Risk!". The percentage-of-portfolio column on the positions table asks the same question one position at a time.
7. Keep the tax position current
Record purchase date, cost base, sale date, proceeds and the gain or loss on each disposal as the year goes, not in the week the return is due.
A review schedule
The intervals below are an example. Adapt them to how often you trade.
A daily check runs a few minutes: position status, anything near a stop or target, overnight news on what you hold.
A weekly review covers the week's result, positions that need adjusting, sector allocation, and events coming up in your holdings.
A monthly review is the full performance analysis, the strategy assessment, and your tax position so far.
A quarterly review asks the larger question: whether the strategy is still the one you want, with a quarter of trades behind you to answer it.
Risk monitoring
At the position level, three numbers: the distance from the current price to your stop, what that distance costs in money, and what it costs as a share of the portfolio.
Swingfolio's positions table puts a bar between the two levels for this. It shows the stop on the left, the target on the right, and how far price has travelled toward whichever one it is heading for as a percentage.
At the portfolio level, the figures are total risk across open positions and how much of the account is sitting in cash.
Tax tracking
Keep the disposal record as you go: purchase date, cost base, sale date, proceeds, gain or loss, and holding period. Everything a tax return asks for is derived from those.
Holding period matters because several countries treat gains differently by how long the asset was held. Australia applies a 50% capital gains discount to assets held for more than twelve months. The United States sets the same boundary. IRS Topic 409 states that "Generally, if you hold the asset for more than one year before you dispose of it, your capital gain or loss is long-term". The same page names exceptions to that rule, including property acquired by gift, property acquired from a decedent, and patent property.
Selling at a loss and buying the holding back is treated differently again by country.
IRS Publication 550 sets the United States rule. A wash sale, it says, "occurs when you sell or trade stock or securities at a loss and within 30 days before or after the sale you" buy substantially identical stock or securities. The disallowed loss is added to the cost of the new stock rather than lost.
Australia has no equivalent 30-day test. The ATO addresses the same behaviour through Taxpayer Alert TA 2008/7 and TR 2008/1. Those apply Part IVA where an asset is disposed of at a loss but "there is no substantial change in economic interest in the asset". Find out which rules reach you before you plan around either.
Swingfolio's Tax Report page builds the jurisdiction's own report from the same trade record. Every jurisdiction gets All Trades, short-term and long-term views, labelled for its own rules; Australian returns add a Tax Report tab and a MyTax Fields tab.
This article is general information and not tax advice.
Common tracking mistakes
Updating on some days and not others. The gaps are where the errors live, because a fill you did not record is one you will not remember.
More than one system. Some trades in a spreadsheet, some in the broker, some in an app. Three partial records answer no question fully. Pick one and make it the record.
Tracking only open positions. The closed trades are the ones carrying your win rate, your expectancy and every pattern in your results.
Ignoring cash. A portfolio that is 70% cash and a portfolio that is fully invested can post the same return on the invested part and mean different things.
Tracking fifty figures. Every number you track is a number you maintain. If a figure has never changed a decision, it is costing you time.
Start tracking
Every figure in this article comes out of one record: what you bought, when, at what price, with what stop, for what fee, and what happened when you closed it. Get that in one place and the rest is arithmetic.
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