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Getting Started : Charting Your Investments

© Kirk Lindstrom

One of my favorite links is NETworth Quote Server by GALT Technologies, Inc." , which is part of the Quicken Financial Network. Unlike most other sites that monitor your portfolio, this site now allows multiple LARGE portfolios. This is useful if you help others with their investments, if you want to track your assets grouped by class or you want to track a phantom account. I'll walk you through an example so you can set up your own portfolio.

I find it useful to study a stocks price well in advance of when I buy it. I like to track its price on a spreadsheet that I update every weekend. I also like to follow how it reacts to both good and bad news also. For this task, I find the MyYahoo> link to be very useful since it gives news for items in my portfolio.

I consider following a stocks price and watching how it reacts to news fairly advanced. New investors are better served to FIRST just track what they own and then chart with a spreadsheet each month or week the total value of their portfolio. Below are steps to get the value of your portfolio.

1. First, PRINT out this page.
2. Then, click on my NetWorth link or this link. You should be transported to "http://quotes.quicken.com/".
3. Click on "Portfolio" in green near the top under the advertisement.
4. Enter a name for your portfolio and a password or check out my portfolio for this example and enter "suite101" and "kirk"
5. If you do your own portfolio, recommended, then you will have to provide some data. Remember to write down your password.
6. Assuming you've provided the information and joined, click on "Create your customized NETworth Portfolio" when you get to this screen.
7. Under "Ticker" enter the symbol for your stock or mutual fund. For my Example, I used "AMAT"
8. Under "Total investment" enter the total price paid including commissions
9. Under Shares, enter the number of shares you own today
10. Let "Display Order" default unless you want to reorder your account.
11. Enter more data and click on "Submit" when finished.

If your browser is Java enabled, then you can get a cool stock ticker by clicking on "Java Ticker". Since I have a large screen, I turn off all the toolbars and misc stuff and resize the window so I have just the java ticker running at the upper left of my screen as I write this article with MS Word on the right hand side of my screen. Try it with my suite101 portfolio and see for yourself if you have problems or write questions in the discussion area.

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