Category: EquityStat Tips

How to Track Stock Gifted to Grandchildren

Posted on | by equitystat

Learning how to track stock gifted to grandchildren is not something most families think about until years later, when a few old shares turn out to be worth far more than anyone expected. That is exactly what happened in a story a retired Merrill Lynch advisor shared in Barron’s, and it is worth reading for anyone who has ever bought stock as a gift and mostly forgotten about it since.

A stock nobody had heard of

In 1983, a grandmother walked into a Merrill Lynch office wanting to buy a Christmas gift for her three grandchildren. She wanted one share each of a company called Berkshire Hathaway. At the time it was not the household name it is today. The broker looked up the price, saw it trading around $2,000 a share, and thought it seemed expensive for a single share of stock most people had never heard of.

The grandmother saw it differently. She had grown up in Omaha and knew of the company’s chief executive Warren Buffett. She believed it was a good buy, bought the three shares, and the certificates went into the grandchildren’s stockings that Christmas.

What decades of compounding actually looks like

Berkshire Hathaway went on to perform far better than almost anyone could have predicted in 1983, and decades of compounding turned three modest shares into a position worth an estimated $2.3 million today. If the grandchildren did not sell the shares, they ended up wealthy, not because anyone made a brilliant trade, but because a good stock was bought and then simply left alone.

Why this kind of holding is so easy to lose track of

Stock given as a gift tends to disappear from view in a way that actively managed stock does not. There is rarely a clean record of the price the stock was purchased at, when dividends were reinvested, or how the original purchase turned into a gain or loss decades later. That gap between owning a stock and actually understanding it is where a good stock portfolio tracking tool like EquityStat matters most.

Seeing performance over the full holding period

EquityStat’s performance graphs let an investor see exactly how a stock has performed over time, not just what it is worth today. For a position held across decades, this view shows how the stock performed over the long-term.

That long view matters even more next to a benchmark. EquityStat lets investors compare their stock’s performance directly against market indexes like the Dow, the Nasdaq, and the S&P 500, so a big return can be measured against what the broader market did over the same period rather than judged in isolation.

How to track dividend reinvestment on a long held stock

A three share gift rarely stays three shares. Reinvested dividends quietly add to a position year after year, and most people holding a gifted stock have no real sense of how much of their eventual gain came from price appreciation versus decades of compounding dividends. Seeing that breakdown, both for the current quarter and going back over the full holding period, is the difference between a vague sense that a stock did well and a concrete understanding of why.

EquityStat’s Portfolio Analysis page was built for this kind of long horizon question. It shows dividends received over time, dividends year to date, dividends for the current quarter, and expected dividends ahead, at both the account level and portfolio level, so a gifted or long held position does not stay a mystery for forty years.

Tracking the dividends along the way

If Berkshire Hathaway had paid a dividend over those decades, EquityStat would have tracked it the same way it tracks dividends for any other stock, recording each payment and showing dividends received over time. That record matters for understanding income from a long held position, not just its price.

Why cost basis matters more than most investors realize

EquityStat also calculates cost basis automatically, and this is where reinvested dividends usually complicate things. Every time a dividend gets reinvested, it changes the cost basis of the position, and keeping that running total by hand over a multi decade holding period is not easy to do accurately. EquityStat handles the cost basis calculation as it happens.

Cost basis is not just a tax detail. It is required to figure out gain or loss when a stock is eventually sold, but it also plays a direct role in calculating the actual return on the investment. Without an accurate cost basis, there is no way to know how well a stock really performed, gift or otherwise.

The real takeaway

The grandmother in this story was not trying to predict the future. She trusted a company she understood and hopefully let the investment sit for decades. Most investors are not going to find the next Berkshire Hathaway, but any stock held long enough deserves the same basic discipline, and the same clear record of its cost basis, dividends, and performance against the market. That record is what eventually turns a forgotten gift into a number a family can actually use.

Bogleheads Investing Is Not Passive, It Is Just Patient. Here Is How to Track the Difference

Posted on | by equitystat

Bogleheads often get labeled as passive investors, but that word does not really capture what is going on. Anyone who has followed the Boglehead philosophy knows there is nothing passive about choosing to stay invested through a downturn, resisting the urge to chase a hot fund, or rebalancing on a schedule instead of a hunch. It looks passive from the outside because there is no daily trading and no dramatic moves. What is actually happening underneath is a quiet, deliberate kind of patience, and patience is a decision that gets made again and again, not a habit that runs on autopilot.

What is a Boglehead?

Before going further, it helps to define the term. A Boglehead is an investor who follows the investing philosophy associated with John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and the creator of the first index funds. The Bogleheads community grew out of his ideas and now includes anyone who favors low cost index funds, broad diversification, and a long term buy and hold approach over picking stocks or trying to beat the market. It is less a formal group and more a shared mindset, built around the belief that most investors do better by keeping things simple and staying out of their own way.

The Discipline Hiding Behind the Simplicity

The Bogleheads approach is built on a small set of ideas that are easy to state and hard to live by. Buy low cost index funds. Diversify broadly. Keep costs down. Do not try to time the market. Stay the course when things get uncomfortable. None of this requires much action, but it does require a kind of steady attention that is different from the constant checking and reacting that defines most investing behavior.

That is the part that gets missed. A Boglehead is not someone who ignores their portfolio. They are someone who watches it with a longer lens, checking in with intention rather than anxiety. The market noise is still there. They are just choosing not to respond to it the way an active trader would.

Patient Investing Requires Empirical Evidence

Here is the problem with patience as a strategy. It does not feel like it is working most of the time. When you are not making trades, not chasing performance, and not reacting to headlines, it can start to feel like nothing is happening at all. That feeling is exactly where a lot of investors lose their nerve and abandon a sound plan for something that feels more active, even if it is worse for them in the long run.

This is where tracking becomes important, not as a way to encourage more activity, but as a way to make the results of patience visible. If a Boglehead cannot see the compounding, the dividend growth, or the long term performance of their portfolio against a benchmark like the S&P 500, then patience is just a feeling. With the right view of the numbers, patience becomes something you can actually see working.

EquityStat Is a Great Tool For Bogleheads

EquityStat was not built for people who want to watch the market every hour. It was built to give a clear picture of what a portfolio is doing over time, which fits naturally with how Bogleheads already think about investing.

The Portfolio Analysis page shows dividends received over time, both at the account level and the portfolio level, so a Boglehead following a dividend reinvestment approach can see that reinvestment compounding. Reinvested dividends, reinvested short term capital gains, and reinvested long term capital gains can all be recorded in EquityStat.

The Portfolio Analysis page also breaks out dividends year to date, dividends for the current quarter, and expected dividends, which gives a Boglehead a natural checkpoint. Instead of watching a portfolio daily, checking in quarterly or yearly becomes enough, because the numbers are already organized in a way that makes sense for the long-term investor.

Patient Does Not Mean Passive

The Bogleheads community has never actually argued for doing nothing. It argues for doing less, and doing it consistently, which is not easy to accomplish. Tracking a portfolio the right way does not go against that philosophy. It supports it, by providing empirical evidence on how an investors investments are performing.

If you follow a Bogleheads style approach, the goal is not to watch your portfolio less. It is to watch it at the right pace, with the right numbers in front of you, so the patience you are practicing has something to show for itself.

Warren Buffett Investing Philosophy – What His Birthday Reminds Us About Building a Portfolio

Posted on | by equitystat

Warren Buffett’s investing philosophy has shaped how millions of everyday investors think about the stock market, and his birthday, August 30th, is a good excuse to revisit why his approach has held up for so long. Buffett was born in Omaha in 1930, and in the decades since he has built Berkshire Hathaway into one of the wealthiest companies in thew world, all while sticking to a small set of principles that have barely changed.

Think of a Stock Like a Business

One of Buffett’s most repeated ideas is that when you buy a stock, you are buying a piece of a real business, not a symbol that moves up and down on a screen. He has said many times that he only buys companies he understands well enough to explain in simple terms. That discipline is easy to say and hard to practice, especially when a portfolio is scattered across a brokerage, a 401k account, and a handful of Excel spreadsheets. A stock portfolio tracker like EquityStat brings your stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs into one place, so you can actually see the businesses you own instead of a confusing pile of account statements.

Buy and Hold Philosophy

Buffett has held some of his core investments for decades, and he is famous for saying that his favorite holding period is forever. That kind of patience only works if you can see how an investment has actually performed over the long stretch, not just today’s price movement. EquityStat tracks your gain, your annualized return, and your year-to-date performance for every holding, so you can judge an investment the way Buffett does, over years, not days.

Know Your Cost Basis

Buffett pays close attention to what he actually paid for a business, because that number is what determines whether a sale is a smart decision or a costly mistake at tax time. Cost basis is one of those details that is easy to lose track of, especially after years of buys, sells, dividends, and stock splits. EquityStat calculates cost basis automatically from your full transaction history, so when it is time to sell, you already know exactly where you stand.

Reinvest Dividends and Let Compounding Work

A large part of Berkshire Hathaway’s growth has come from patient compounding, not frequent trades. For everyday investors, dividends play a similar role. Buffett has praised the power of reinvested earnings for decades. Tracking that growth matters just as much for a personal portfolio as it does for a company the size of Berkshire. EquityStat logs dividend income at the individual holding level and rolls it up across your entire account, so you can watch that compounding happen in your own investments.

Measure Yourself Against the Market

Buffett believes if your portfolio is not beating a simple index fund over time, you might be better off just owning an index fund. He has recommended a low-cost S&P 500 fund for most investors more than once. Whether you are trying to beat the market or simply want to know if you are keeping pace with it, EquityStat lets you graph your portfolio directly against the S&P 500, the Dow Jones, and the Nasdaq, so you get a real answer instead of a guess.

Try Out Our Berkshire Hathaway Calculator

If you have ever wondered what a long term, patient approach like Buffett’s actually looks like in dollars, our Berkshire Hathaway calculator lets you plug in a purchase date and see what that investment would be worth today. It is a fun way to see compounding in action before applying the same patient thinking to your own portfolio.

Happy Birthday to one of the world’s best investors. To be a great investor like Warren Buffett, you need a great tool to track your investments, not just good instincts. Buying what you understand, holding with patience, watching your cost basis, and measuring yourself against the market are habits any investor can build, and EquityStat is built to make those habits easier to keep.

The Complete Guide to Tracking Dividend Income Across Multiple Accounts

Posted on | by equitystat

Tracking dividend income across multiple accounts is one of the biggest challenges dividend investors face once their portfolio grows beyond a single brokerage. A few shares of one stock sitting in a taxable brokerage account, a retirement account, and a dividend reinvestment plan can each generate payouts on different schedules, and keeping an accurate picture of your total income becomes difficult fast.

Why Dividend Tracking Gets Complicated

Most investors do not start out with a complicated setup. They open one brokerage account, buy a handful of dividend paying stocks, and check their statement once a quarter. Over time, though, portfolios tend to spread out. A Roth IRA gets opened for retirement savings. An old 401k gets rolled into an IRA at a different provider. A dividend reinvestment plan is set up directly through a company. Each of these accounts pays dividends on its own schedule, and each one reports that income in a slightly different way.

Once you have three, four, or five accounts generating dividend payments, a simple mental tally is no longer enough. You need a system.

The Problem with Relying on Brokerage Apps Alone

Every brokerage offers some kind of dashboard showing dividends received in that account. The problem is that none of them show you the full picture. Your brokerage app can tell you what you earned in dividends at that one institution, but it has no way of knowing what your other accounts paid you. If you want your true total dividend income for the year, you are stuck adding numbers by hand from several different platforms, and that process only gets more error prone as your holdings grow.

Some investors try to solve this with a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets. This works for a while, but building formulas to track dividends, capital gains, and reinvestments across several accounts takes real effort to set up, and it is easy for a spreadsheet like this to break or fall out of date as your portfolio changes.

How EquityStat Helps You Track Dividend Income

EquityStat was built to solve exactly this problem, and it is often considered the best dividend tracking app for investors juggling more than one account. Instead of piecing together numbers from different brokerages or maintaining your own spreadsheet, EquityStat gives you a single place to record and view your dividend income across every account you hold.

Record Every Type of Dividend Transaction

EquityStat lets you record dividend transactions in detail, not just as a lump sum. You can log dividends, short term capital gains, and long term capital gains separately, so your records reflect exactly what you were paid and how it will be treated at tax time. This level of detail matters, since dividends, short term gains, and long term gains are often taxed differently, and having them recorded separately from the start saves you from trying to sort it all out later.

For a full walkthrough, see how to track dividends and capital gains in EquityStat.

Record Reinvested Dividends and Capital Gains

If your dividends, short term capital gains, or long term capital gains are automatically reinvested rather than paid out in cash, EquityStat lets you record those reinvestments as well. This matters because reinvested payouts still count as income even though you never see the cash, and skipping them in your records will understate what you actually earned and can create confusion later when calculating cost basis.

See Your Dividend Growth in a Graph

The Portfolio Analysis page in EquityStat includes a graph showing how much you have received in dividends over time. You can view this graph at the portfolio level, which is useful for seeing how a single IRA or brokerage account is performing on its own, or at the full account level, which combines every portfolio and investment you hold into one overall trend. Seeing your dividend income laid out visually makes it much easier to spot growth, notice a dividend cut, or see the impact of a new position you added.

See Dividends Year to Date, This Quarter, Expected, and Total

The Portfolio Analysis page also breaks your dividend income down into figures that matter most to investors: dividends received year to date, dividends received this quarter, expected dividends based on your current holdings, and total dividends earned overall. Each of these is available at both the account level and the portfolio level, so you can see how one specific account is performing or view your income across everything you hold at once. Having expected dividends alongside your actual totals is especially useful for planning, since it gives you a sense of the income headed your way before it actually arrives.

Keep Your Dividend Records Ready for Tax Season

Once every account, every dividend, and every capital gain is recorded in one place, tax season becomes much less stressful. Rather than gathering forms from several institutions and trying to reconcile them by hand or rebuild a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets, you already have a complete record of what you were paid, when you were paid it, and which account it came from.

Start Tracking Your Full Dividend Picture

Dividend income is one of the clearest signals of how your portfolio is actually performing, but only if you can see all of it at once. EquityStat brings every account, every dividend, and every capital gain into a single view instead of leaving you to add it all up yourself. See how EquityStat works and start tracking your dividend income across every account you hold.

Monster Beverage Is Splitting 2-for-1 on Aug. 11

Posted on | by equitystat

Monster Beverage (NASDAQ: MNST) is splitting its stock 2-for-1, with shares beginning to trade at their new, split-adjusted price on August 11, 2026. Shareholders of record as of July 24 will see the additional shares credited to their accounts after the market closes on August 10. It is not the company’s first split. Monster’s share price has climbed substantially over the years, and splits like this one are typically how a company keeps its per-share price more accessible as growth continues.

What the Split Actually Means for Shareholders

A 2-for-1 split doubles your share count and roughly halves the price per share, but it does not change the total value of your position. If you owned 100 shares of Monster before the split, you’ll own 200 shares afterward, at approximately half the per-share price. Your overall stake in the company is unchanged, only the number of shares and the price tag on each one are different.

Why You Still Need to Record It

Even though a split does not change what your position is worth, it does change your share count and your cost basis per share going forward. If a split is not recorded in your stock portfolio tracker, your holdings will show the wrong number of shares and an inflated cost basis, which throws off both your ongoing performance numbers and your eventual capital gains calculations when you sell.

How to Record the Split in EquityStat

Recording a split in EquityStat takes just a few steps – select the stock, add a new transaction, choose Split as the activity type, and enter the split ratio, 2 for 1 in Monster’s case. EquityStat then automatically adjusts your share count and cost basis for every prior transaction on that stock.

For the full walkthrough with screenshots, see our guide on how to record a stock split in EquityStat, which covers the exact steps using Tesla’s split as a worked example. The same process applies to Monster Beverage, or any other stock split, regardless of the ratio.

Why You Can’t See Your Real Investment Performance From Any Single Brokerage App

Posted on | by equitystat

Open your brokerage app right now and it will tell you exactly how that account is doing. What it won’t tell you is how you’re doing. If you also have a 401(k) with a former employer, an IRA at a different provider, or a handful of mutual funds bought years ago, your brokerage app has no idea any of that exists. It’s not being unhelpful, it simply can’t see outside its own walls. That’s the core problem with trying to understand your investment performance one account at a time, and it’s the reason a dedicated stock portfolio tracker exists in the first place.

Every Brokerage App Has the Same Blind Spot

Brokerage apps are built to serve one purpose, help you manage the money that is inside that specific brokerage. Fidelity’s app knows about your Fidelity account. Schwab’s app knows about your Schwab account. Neither one has any visibility into the other, and neither has any reason to build that visibility, since it isn’t their job to help you understand your finances outside their platform.

That means every number you see in a brokerage app, your return, your gain, your dividend income, is only ever a partial answer. If you’re checking three or four different apps to get a sense of where you stand, you’re not actually looking at your investment performance. You’re looking at fragments of it, and doing the aggregation yourself, in your head, imperfectly.

What You Actually Can’t See Without Aggregating

A few specific numbers are simply impossible to calculate from any single account:

  • Total return across everything you own. A single brokerage can tell you its own return, but not your blended return once a 401(k), an IRA, and a taxable brokerage account are all factored in together.
  • Combined dividend income. If you own dividend-paying stocks in more than one account, no single provider can show you your total dividend income for the year. Only a dedicated stock dividend tracker that pulls every account together can do that.
  • True asset allocation. Your brokerage app might show you’re well-diversified within that account, while you’re unknowingly overexposed to a single sector once your 401(k) holdings are counted too.
  • Overall net worth. Net worth isn’t a brokerage feature, it’s an aggregation problem. It only exists once every account, brokerage, retirement, and otherwise, is added together.
  • Which of your accounts is actually performing best. Without a side-by-side comparison, there’s no way to know whether your IRA, your brokerage account, or your old 401(k) is doing the heavy lifting, or dragging down your results.

None of these are edge cases. They’re the basic questions any investor eventually wants answered, and none of them can be answered by a tool that only sees one piece of the puzzle.

Why a Spreadsheet Doesn’t Really Solve It Either

The obvious workaround is to build a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets and update it yourself. In practice, this breaks down quickly. Prices need to be looked up and re-entered by hand. Returns have to be recalculated with every trade. Dividends have to be logged manually as they arrive. It is not that a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets cannot hold the data, it is that keeping it accurate becomes a part-time job.

A proper stock portfolio tracker application solves the maintenance problem specifically. It pulls current prices automatically and recalculates your returns as soon as you log a transaction, so the aggregated view stays accurate without you having to rebuild it every time something changes, the way you would need to in an Excel or Google Sheets file. You still enter your own trades and holdings, the same way you would in a spreadsheet, but the tracker takes over everything else, the pricing, the math, and the performance calculations.

What a Real Stock Portfolio Manager Should Show You

A tool built specifically to solve this problem, rather than a brokerage app that happens to show you a balance, should be able to answer the questions your individual accounts can’t:

  • Consolidated performance metrics. Gain, quarterly return, year-to-date return, and annualized return, calculated across your full portfolio, not just one account at a time.
  • Benchmark comparisons. The ability to see whether your overall strategy is beating, matching, or underperforming the S&P 500, Dow Jones, or Nasdaq, something no single brokerage account can tell you in isolation.
  • Dividend tracking at every level. Dividend income visible per investment, per portfolio, and across your entire account, so you always know your true income from holdings, not just the ones in one place.
  • Historical view. The ability to see what your full portfolio looked like on a past date, useful for reviewing performance over time or preparing for tax season.
  • Tax reporting that spans everything you sold. When it’s time to file, a consolidated tracker can generate IRS Form 8949 covering every sale across every account, calculating your long-term and short-term gains and losses so you can hand the report straight to your accountant.

This is the same reasoning EquityStat was built around from the start, investors who were managing their own money got tired of tools that could only see one slice of it, and built something that could see all of it instead.

The Real Cost of Not Aggregating

The risk of checking accounts separately isn’t just inconvenience, it’s blind spots that compound over time. An investor might feel diversified because each individual account looks reasonable, while their combined holdings are quietly concentrated in one sector or a handful of overlapping funds. Or they might underestimate how much they’re actually earning in dividends because it’s split across three accounts and never added up. Or they simply won’t know, in any given year, whether their overall strategy is working, because “overall” was never actually calculated.

None of these are dramatic failures. They’re just the slow cost of never having the full picture, and they’re avoidable the moment every account gets pulled into one place.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why can’t my brokerage app show me my total portfolio performance? Because it only has visibility into the account it manages. It has no data about your other brokerage accounts, your 401(k), or your IRA, so it can only ever report on its own slice of your investments.

Is a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets a good enough substitute for a portfolio tracker? A spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets can hold the data, but keeping prices, returns, and dividends current requires ongoing manual work. A dedicated stock portfolio tracker automates the pricing and performance calculations, so the aggregated view stays accurate without constant upkeep.

What accounts should I include when tracking my investment performance? Every account that holds investments, brokerage accounts, 401(k)s, IRAs, and mutual funds, should be included. Leaving any of them out means your total return, dividend income, and asset allocation numbers will all be incomplete.

Can I see my net worth using a stock portfolio tracker? Yes, as long as the tracker supports multiple account types. Net worth is fundamentally an aggregation calculation, so it depends on having every account represented in one place rather than checked separately.

Getting Started with EquityStat: A Quick Setup Guide For Your Stock Portfolio Tracker

Posted on | by equitystat

Setting up EquityStat takes just a few minutes, and once your first investment is entered, you’ll have a working stock portfolio tracker you can build on. This quick getting started guide walks through adding your first investment, understanding your portfolio view, entering additional transactions, and keeping your portfolio organized as your holdings change over time.

Add Your First Investment

After you join EquityStat, you’ll be logged into your account. Since you won’t have any investments yet, you’ll see an empty portfolio screen. From here, click the New Investment button to add your first holding.

EquityStat Stock Portfolio Directions

Add transactions to EquityStatClicking New Investment opens a dialog where you can enter a buy transaction. Enter the symbol of the investment, the date of purchase, the number of shares purchased, and the price per share, then click Save. Once your first purchase is entered, you can go on to add other transactions for that same investment, including additional buys, sells, and dividends.

Understanding Your Portfolio View

Once you’ve added a few investments, your portfolio view will look something like the example below.

Getting Start With EquityStat Portfolio Tracker
Directions on EquityStat’s Portfolio Manager

The top table lists all of your investments along with key performance metrics and data about each investment. Below it, you’ll see the transactions for whichever investment is currently selected. You can sort your investments and transactions by clicking any column heading, and you can widen a column by dragging its border. Above the investment table, a summary section shows your total portfolio value, total dollar return, day’s gain or loss, and year-to-date return, giving you an at-a-glance read on how your stock portfolio manager sees your overall performance.

Add Transactions to EquityStat's Investment Portfolio
How to add transactions to EquityStat

Adding More Investments

As your portfolio grows, you’ll need to log new investments and additional transactions.

To add an investment that isn’t in your portfolio yet, click the New menu and choose New Investment. To add a transaction to an investment you already hold, go to the transaction table below the investment table and click Add. A new row appears where you can record a buy, sell, dividend, or one of several other transaction types. You can edit an existing transaction by selecting it and clicking Edit, or remove one entirely with the Delete button. If you’re moving a large number of trades in at once, it’s often faster toImport your transactions from a csv file into EquityStat instead of entering them one at a time.

Hiding Sold Investments

Once you’ve sold out of a position entirely, you may not want it cluttering your active portfolio view.

Click the three-line icon on the left and choose Hide Sold Investments to remove fully sold holdings from view. To bring them back at any point, for example when you’re reviewing past performance, click the icon again and choose View Sold Investments.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to set up EquityStat? Adding your first investment takes less than a minute. A full portfolio with multiple holdings can typically be built out in under 15 minutes.

Can I import my existing transaction history instead of entering it manually? Yes. If you’re already tracking your investments elsewhere, you can import your transaction history from a Import your transactions into EquityStat rather than re-entering everything by hand.

What if I sell all of an investment, can I still see its history? Yes. Sold investments can be hidden from your active view to reduce clutter, but you can bring them back into view at any time to review their full history.

Who Is EquityStat, What Does It Do, and Why Do You Need It?

Posted on | by equitystat

Most investors don’t have one account. They have a brokerage account, maybe a 401(k) from work, an IRA, a handful of mutual funds picked up over the years. Each one lives on a different platform, with a different login, showing a different slice of the picture, and none of them show the whole thing. EquityStat exists to answer a simple question: what if you could see all of it in one place?

Who is EquityStat?

EquityStat is a stock portfolio tracker built by investors, for investors. It wasn’t designed by a bank or a brokerage trying to keep you inside their ecosystem, but was built instead by people who were managing their own investments and got tired of the tools available to them. That distinction matters. A stock portfolio manager built by someone with a brokerage relationship to protect has a reason to keep your data siloed. A stock portfolio tracker application built by investors, for investors, doesn’t, since its only job is to give you an accurate, complete view of what you own.

That independence is also why EquityStat doesn’t ask for your brokerage passwords or sell your information. You enter your own holdings and transactions, and the platform’s only incentive is to represent them accurately. It’s a meaningfully different relationship than tools built around monetizing your financial data.

EquityStat’s reputation has grown the same way most trustworthy financial tools do: one investor at a time, through word of mouth and results. Customers describe it as more complete than their brokerage’s own software, better than other trackers they’d tried, and easier to log into than jumping through their broker’s site. That kind of comparative praise, from people who tried alternatives first, carries real weight. It’s also drawn outside recognition: Kiplinger’s Personal Finance featured EquityStat in a 2024 roundup of tools for do-it-yourself stock investors, specifically as a pick for portfolio tracking.  You can read the full Kiplinger Magazine names EquityStat a top stock portfolio manager.

What is EquityStat?

EquityStat is a stock portfolio tracker application that consolidates every investment account you have, including brokerage accounts, 401(k)s, IRAs, and more, and every asset type you hold in them, including stocks, bonds, ETFs, and mutual funds, into a single dashboard. Instead of multiple logins and multiple different partial pictures, you get one.

Once your accounts are in, EquityStat goes well beyond just listing what you own. As a full stock portfolio manager, it calculates gain, quarterly return, year-to-date return, and annualized return for each holding, portfolio, and account. It works as a dedicated stock dividend tracker, logging dividends down to the individual investment level, and it lets you record buys, sells, and splits for each holding. You can even go back in time and see exactly what your portfolio looked like on any past date, something a spreadsheet or a single brokerage login simply can’t do across accounts.

On the analysis side, EquityStat delivers summary performance graphs, individual investment performance graphs, and benchmark comparisons against the S&P 500, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq, at the account level, the portfolio level, or drilled down to a single holding. It also generates IRS Form 8949 and calculates cost basis, gains, and losses, so tax season doesn’t mean reconstructing a year of transactions by hand.

And because it’s built for how people actually check their investments, it’s accessible on desktop, tablet, or smartphone, with a responsive interface you can customize, choosing which metrics and columns display, and sorting holdings or transactions by the order that works best for you.

Why EquityStat?

Here’s the core problem EquityStat solves: if your investments are spread across multiple accounts, you cannot actually see your real financial picture without aggregating them somewhere. Your brokerage app only knows about your brokerage account. Your 401(k) provider only knows about your 401(k). Neither one can tell you your total return across everything you own, your combined dividend income, or how your overall asset allocation looks once every account is counted together. That picture only exists if something pulls all the pieces into one place, and that’s exactly what a good stock portfolio tracker is for.

This is the reason a spreadsheet isn’t really a solution, either. Building one manually means looking up prices by hand, recalculating returns yourself, and updating the whole thing every time you make a trade. EquityStat handles the price side of that automatically, pulling current stock, mutual fund, and ETF quotes and recalculating your returns in real time, so once you’ve logged a trade, your performance numbers stay current without any extra work.

The payoff is real financial clarity. When every account rolls up into one stock portfolio manager, you can finally answer the questions that actually matter: Is my overall net worth going up? Which of my accounts is actually performing best? How much am I really earning in dividends across everything I own? Am I overexposed to one sector once you count my 401(k) alongside my brokerage account? None of those questions can be answered by looking at accounts one at a time, they require aggregation, which is the entire reason EquityStat exists.

For investors who’ve been checking three or four different logins just to get a partial sense of where they stand, that single consolidated view is the difference between managing your investments and merely monitoring pieces of them. That’s why EquityStat is built the way it is, as one place to aggregate everything, so you always know exactly where you stand.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who built EquityStat? EquityStat was built by investors who were managing their own portfolios and found the available tracking tools incomplete.

What accounts can EquityStat track? Brokerage accounts, 401(k)s, IRAs, and other account types can all be tracked side by side, and organized into separate portfolios if you want to keep them distinct.

Why do I need to aggregate my investment accounts in one place? Because no single brokerage or plan provider can show you your total return, combined dividend income, or overall asset allocation across accounts they don’t have visibility into. Only a consolidated stock portfolio tracker can show you that complete picture.

Has EquityStat been reviewed by any outside publications? Yes. Kiplinger Magazine names EquityStat a top stock portfolio tracker covering top tools for DIY stock investors, specifically recommending it as a portfolio tracker.

Explore Your Past Portfolio Performance with EquityStat’s “View On Date” Feature

Posted on | by equitystat

Investing is not just about tracking today’s number, it’s about understanding your portfolio’s journey over time. That’s why EquityStat, your all-in-one stock portfolio tracker, is excited to introduce a powerful new feature: View On Date. Now, you can look back at your holdings and portfolio performance on any past date, giving you deeper insight into your investment strategy.

Introducing “View On Date”

The View On Date feature allows you to examine your portfolio exactly as it appeared on a specific past date. When you select a past date:

  • Only the investments you held on that date will be displayed.
  • Performance metrics are calculated using the closing prices from that date, giving you an accurate snapshot of your historical portfolio performance.

Whether you’re reviewing historical performance, analyzing past trades, or comparing growth over time, this tool gives you precise insight into your investment history.

How to Use “View On Date”

View your EquityStat stock portfolio on a past date.
  1. Via the Options Menu:
    • Click the Options menu at the top of your portfolio dashboard.
    • Select View On Date from the dropdown.
    • Enter the past date you want to review in the dialog box.

  2. Using the Change Date Link:
    • Underneath the “Quotes Updated” date, click Change Date to select a past date.

  3. Portfolio Analysis for Past Dates:
    • In the upper right-hand corner of your portfolio dashboard, click the View On Date link to access historical portfolio analysis.

Once you’re viewing your portfolio on a past date, a banner message at the top of the page will show the date you’re analyzing. To return to your current holdings, simply click Revert To Today.

View your EquityStat stock portfolio on a past date.

Why Investors Will Love This Feature

  • Historical Insights: Understand how your portfolio has performed over weeks, months, or even years.
  • Performance Analysis: Evaluate the impact of past decisions to refine your investment strategy.
  • Simplified Tracking: No more manual tracking or spreadshee, see past performance directly in EquityStat.

This feature makes EquityStat not just a real-time portfolio tracker, but a historical analysis tool that empowers investors to make smarter decisions.

Start Exploring Your Portfolio History Today

With EquityStat’s View On Date feature, you have complete control over your portfolio insight, past, present, and future. Stay informed, track your progress, and make confident investment decisions all from a single platform.

2025 IRS Form 8949: How to Quickly Generate Your Capital Gains Report with EquityStat

Posted on | by equitystat

If you sold stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, or other investments during 2025, you’ll need to report your gains and losses on IRS Form 8949 when filing your 2025 tax return. To make this process faster and more accurate, EquityStat now provides an automated Form 8949 generator.

What Is IRS Form 8949?

IRS Form 8949 is the official document used to report:

  • Short‑term capital gains and losses (assets held for one year or less)
  • Long‑term capital gains and losses (assets held for more than one year)

If you sold any taxable investment in 2025, including stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, this form will help your tax preparer produce your tax return.

Generate tax form 8949 with EquityStat

Generate Your 2025 Form 8949 Automatically in EquityStat

EquityStat’s updated tools now support instant creation of the 2025 Form 8949, helping you avoid manual calculations and spreadsheet errors.

How to Generate Form 8949 in EquityStat

  1. Open the Tools menu in your EquityStat dashboard
  2. Select Generate IRS Form 8949
  3. Choose the tax year you want to generate Form 8949 for
  4. Click Generate on the Form 8949 page

Within seconds, EquityStat calculates:

  • Short‑term gains and losses
  • Long‑term gains and losses
  • Adjusted cost basis
  • Totals required for Schedule D

A PDF formatted exactly to IRS specifications is created and ready for download.

What You Can Do With Your Generated Form 8949

Your completed PDF can be:

  • Uploaded directly into your tax software
  • Sent to your accountant or tax preparer
  • Printed and included with a paper tax return

This ensures your capital‑gains reporting is complete, accurate, and compliant.

Why Investors Choose EquityStat for Form 8949

EquityStat is built for both high‑volume traders and long‑term investors who want reliable tax reporting. Key benefits include:

  • Accurate cost‑basis tracking
  • Automatic gain/loss calculations
  • Fast PDF generation
  • Support for stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds
  • Ideal for 2025 tax‑filing deadlines

Who Should Generate Form 8949?

You should create Form 8949 if you:

  • Sold stocks or ETFs in 2025
  • Sold mutual funds or index funds
  • Need a clean, IRS‑ready summary of gains and losses

If you had any investment sales in 2025, EquityStat’s Form 8949 generator saves time and reduces the risk of filing errors.

Example: What Your Form 8949 Output Includes

Your generated PDF contains:

  • Part I: Short‑term transactions
  • Part II: Long‑term transactions
  • Totals for gains and losses
  • IRS‑compliant formatting and layout

This ensures your tax return is complete and ready for submission.

How to Track Dividends and Capital Gains in Your Stock Portfolio

Posted on | by equitystat

Dividends and capital gains distributions land in your brokerage accounts all year long, but they tend to pile up at the end of the year, when mutual funds and ETFs make their final payouts. If you are not keeping track of them as they come in, it is easy to lose sight of how much income your portfolio is actually producing. It is even easier to end up hunting for numbers when tax season arrives.

EquityStat’s stock portfolio tracker makes it simple to record and monitor dividends, short term capital gains, and long term capital gains across every brokerage account you own, all from one screen

Why Tracking Dividends and Capital Gains Matters

Your brokerage’s website will show you dividends and gains for that one account. Most investors, though, hold assets in more than one place. Maybe you have a 401k through work, a taxable brokerage account you manage yourself, and an IRA somewhere else entirely. Look at any single one of those accounts and you are only ever seeing part of the story.

Keeping this information in one place helps in a few ways. You get an honest picture of how much dividend and capital gains income your whole portfolio produced this year, not just what one brokerage happens to report. You also make tax season easier on yourself, since short term and long term gains are taxed differently and it helps to know which is which well before your 1099s show up. And you get a truer read on how your investments are actually performing, since total return includes dividends and distributions, not just the change in share price.

Dividends vs Short Term vs Long Term Capital Gains

It helps to know which category a distribution falls into before you record it.

Dividends are cash payments a company or fund makes to its shareholders, usually out of earnings.

Short term capital gains come from an investment held for one year or less before it is sold. For mutual funds, this can also include short term gains the fund realized internally and passed along to you as a shareholder.

Long term capital gains come from an investment held for more than a year, and they are generally taxed at a lower rate than short term gains.

Mutual funds and ETFs often distribute some combination of all three at year end, which is exactly why it helps to use a tracker that keeps them separated clearly instead of lumping everything together.

How to Record Dividends and Capital Gains in EquityStat

EquityStat transaction panel showing how to add a dividend or capital gain to a stock portfolio
Transaction Panel Example

Recording a distribution only takes a minute.

  1. Select the investment from your portfolio list.
  2. In the Transaction panel, click Add.
  3. Use the Activity dropdown to choose the type of distribution. For cash payments, select Dividend, Short Term Capital Gain, or Long Term Capital Gain. If the payout was used to buy more shares instead of being paid out as cash, select the Re Invested version of that same option.
  4. Enter the details of the distribution and click Add.

Once that is done, the transaction is reflected in your portfolio’s performance, cost basis, and income totals right away.

Example of entering a capital gain transaction in EquityStat
Example of entering a short-term capital gain.

How to View Your Total Dividend and Capital Gains Income

After you have recorded a few distributions, EquityStat gives you more than one way to see the full picture.

You can customize your portfolio columns by going to the Options menu and selecting Change Columns to add a Total Dividends column, which includes capital gains, directly to your main portfolio view. That way you can see income for each investment without digging through individual transactions.

You can also use the Analyze Portfolio page, found under the Tools menu, which provides graphical performance metrics for your entire account or for individual portfolios. It is a quick way to see income and returns over time without doing the math yourself.

Why This Matters Come Tax Time

When you track dividends and capital gains as they happen throughout the year, you are not stuck rebuilding twelve months of transactions in April. When it is time to file, EquityStat can also help you generate a capital gains report for IRS Form 8949, using the same transaction data you have already entered.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to enter dividends manually in EquityStat? Yes. Dividends and capital gains distributions are entered through the Transaction panel for each investment, using the Activity dropdown to select the correct type of distribution.

What is the difference between short term and long term capital gains? Short term capital gains come from investments held for one year or less. Long term capital gains come from investments held for more than a year and are typically taxed at a lower rate.

Can I see total dividend income across my whole portfolio? Yes. Add the Total Dividends column to your portfolio view, or use the Analyze Portfolio tool for a graphical, account wide breakdown.

Does EquityStat help with tax reporting? Yes. EquityStat can generate a capital gains report formatted for IRS Form 8949 based on the transactions you have recorded.

Alphabet/Google Dividend

Posted on | by equitystat

On June 17, 2024, Alphabet (GOOGL/GOOG) will pay a $0.20 dividend per share. This is the first dividend paid by Alphabet in the history of the company.

With EquityStat’s stock portfolio manager, it is easy to add and track your dividends.

To add a dividend to your Alphabet investment, first select this investment in your investment panel. Then in the transactions panel, click the Add button to add a new transaction.

Add dividends to your EquityStat portfolio.
Alphabet dividend transactions example

Next, select either Dividend or Re-invested Dividend from the Activity drop down. If you didn’t re-invest the dividend, just enter the dividend amount in the Total field.

Add Alphabet dividend to your EquityStat portfolio.
Add Alphabet dividend transaction example

If you re-invested your Alphabet dividend, choose Re-invested Dividend from the Activity drop down. Enter the number of shares you purchased in the Quantity field and enter the price you paid for the shares.

Add a re-invested Alphabet dividend.
Add a Re-invested Dividend example

Once you have entered your dividend information, click the Add button to save the dividend transaction to your portfolio.

You can follow many of these same steps if you have a different investment that pays a dividend.

NVIDIA Stock Split in EquityStat

Posted on | by equitystat

Nvidia’s (NVDA) stock is set to split on June 7th, 2024. It is a 10 for 1 stock split. So, for each share you own before the split, you get 10 shares.

If you owned Nvidia (NVDA) stock before the split and you are tracking this stock in your EquityStat portfolio, how do you record the split?

First, select the Nvidia stock in your investment panel. Next, in the transaction panel, click the Add button to add a new transaction. In the Activity drop down, choose a “Split” transaction. Enter how many shares were split, in this case it is a 10 for 1 split, and click the Add button to save the transaction.

EquityStat split Nvidia stock.
Nvidia stock split transaction

When the split transaction is saved, each transaction will be adjusted to reflect this split. The number of shares will be increased ten times and the price will be divided by ten.

For example, if you had the following transactions before the split.

Nvidia transactions before the split in EquityStat stock portfolio tracker.
Nvidia transactions before the split.

After the split your transactions will look like this.

Nvidia transactions after the split in EquityStat stock portfolio tracker.
Nvidia after the split

Notice that before the split there were two buy transactions. After the split, the number of shares has increased 10 times and the price has been reduced by a factor of ten. For example, the initial buy on 07/21/2021 was for a quantity of 200 shares. After the split, the purchased quantity is 2000 shares. The price the shares were bought on 07/21/2021 was $186.12. After the split, the price paid was $18.61. These adjustments are all automatically done when you enter the split transaction.

If you have other stocks that have split, you can use the same steps to record your split. Just make sure that you enter the correct split information.

2023 8949 IRS Tax Form Released

Posted on | by equitystat

We just released the 2023 8949 IRS tax form.  IRS Form 8949 is a form that reports your short and long term gains/losses for any sold investments in the tax year.  If you had any investment sales in 2023, this form is a great way to easily calculate your losses/gains from this investment sale.

To generate Form 8949 click the Tools menu and choose the “Generate Form 8949” menuitem. On the “Generate Form 8949” page, click the Generate button. Your short-term and long-term gains/losses on any investment sales will then be calculated. Then a pdf format of IRS Form 8949 will be generated. This form has a short-term gains/losses section and long-term gains/losses section, which is what you need when filing your taxes.

Calculate your gains/losses on any stock sale with EquityStat and generate IRS Form 8949.
IRS Form 8949 Example

Once this pdf form is generated, you can then send this pdf file to your tax preparer or print a copy of it.

Automatic Stock Price Lookup: A New Way to Log Trades Faster in EquityStat

Posted on | by equitystat

EquityStat’s stock portfolio tracker now fills in the price of a stock automatically whenever you add a new investment or log a transaction, so you no longer have to look up the exact price of a stock on a specific day by hand.

How Automatic Stock Price Entry Works

When you enter a new stock, ETF, or add a transaction to an investment you already track, EquityStat pulls the closing price, or the current price if the market is still open, for that exact date and places it in the Price field for you. You do not have to search another site or dig through old statements to find the number.

If the price shown is not the one you actually paid or received, you can simply type over it. The automatic price is a starting point, not a requirement.

Example of the auto price feature in EquityStat's portfolio tracker
Example of the auto price feature in EquityStat’s portfolio tracker

Why This Feature Matters for Investors

Many investors do not remember the exact price they paid for a stock, months or years earlier. This feature was built for that exact situation. If you know you bought Apple stock on January 12, 2023 but cannot recall the price, EquityStat fills in the closing price from that date, $134.56, without any extra effort on your part. If your actual purchase price was different, you can adjust it in seconds.

This makes it much easier to keep an accurate, up to date portfolio tracker, even when you are recording trades after the fact or catching up on transactions from earlier in the year.

Look Up Historical Stock Prices in Seconds

The same feature also works as a quick way to check what a stock was trading for on any past date. Select the stock, enter the date, and the price appears immediately. This is useful for confirming cost basis, checking historical performance, or simply satisfying curiosity about how a stock has moved over time.

Start Tracking Your Portfolio More Efficiently

Automatic price entry is one more way EquityStat helps investors manage their stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, and other holdings without unnecessary manual work. If you have not tried EquityStat’s portfolio tracker yet, see how it works and start tracking your investments with less effort and more accuracy.

2022 8949 IRS Tax Form Released

Posted on | by equitystat

We just released the 2022 8949 IRS tax form.  IRS Form 8949 is a form that reports your short and long term gains/losses for any sold investments in the tax year.  If you had any investment sales in 2022, this form is a great way to easily calculate your losses/gains from this investment sale.

To generate Form 8949 click the Tools menu and choose the “Generate Form 8949” menuitem. On the “Generate Form 8949” page, click the Generate button. Your short-term and long-term gains/losses on any investment sales will then be calculated. Then a pdf format of IRS Form 8949 will be generated. This form has a short-term gains/losses section and long-term gains/losses section, which is what you need when filing your taxes.

Calculate your gains/losses on any stock sale with EquityStat and generate IRS Form 8949.
IRS Form 8949 Example

Once this pdf form is generated, you can then send this pdf file to your tax preparer or print a copy of it.

EquityStat: The Best Alternative to Morningstar’s Legacy Portfolio Manager

Posted on | by equitystat

Looking for an Alternative for Morningstar’s Legacy Portfolio Manager?

Morningstar has discontinued its legacy portfolio tracker, leaving many investors searching for a reliable, easy‑to‑use alternative. EquityStat is a powerful, intuitive stock portfolio tracker built by investors for investors and it’s one of the best replacements available today.

Why EquityStat Is the Ideal Morningstar Legacy Portfolio Alternative

EquityStat offers a clean, simple interface and robust performance tracking tools designed for everyday investors and active traders.

Key Benefits

  • Aggregate all your investment accounts in one place
  • Track your dividends and capital gains
  • View account and portfolio value and gain/loss
  • Analyze individual stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds
  • See today’s gain/loss, annualized return, realized gains, and return ytd
  • Review every transaction for each investment
  • Import transactions manually or via spreadsheet
  • Create multiple portfolios for better organization
  • View performance graphs and compare to stock market indexes
  • View your portfolio on a previous date

What You Can Track With EquityStat

EquityStat provides detailed analytics for each investment, including:

  • Daily gain/loss
  • Annualized return
  • Return YTD
  • Realized gains
  • Transaction history
  • Portfolio‑level and account‑level value and performance

Portfolio Analysis Tools

EquityStat includes a powerful Portfolio Analysis page that helps you:

  • Compare performance across multiple portfolios
  • Identify top‑ and bottom‑performing investments
  • View performance charts over time and compare to stock indexes
  • Analyze holdings and allocation

This is especially useful for investors managing multiple accounts or diversified portfolios.

Analyze your stock portfolio
Example of EquityStat’s Portfolio Analyze Page

Importing Your Morningstar Legacy Portfolio

If you previously used Morningstar’s legacy portfolio manager, EquityStat makes it simple to transition.

You’ll be up and running quickly with your full investment history intact.

Why Investors Choose EquityStat

  • Built by investors, for investors
  • Simple, intuitive interface
  • Accurate performance calculations
  • Fast, reliable, and easy to use
  • Ideal for stock, ETF, and mutual fund tracking
  • A strong alternative to Morningstar’s Legacy Portfolio manager discontinued tool

If you’re disappointed to see Morningstar’s legacy portfolio manager go, EquityStat is the perfect replacement.

If you need help importing your Morningstar Legacy portfolio manager into EquityStat, contact our support staff here.

How to Record a Stock Split in EquityStat – Tesla (TSLA)

Posted on | by equitystat

Stock splits change the number of shares you hold and the price you paid for them, without changing the actual value of your investment. If you don’t record a split correctly in your stock portfolio tracker, your share count and cost basis will be wrong going forward, which throws off both your performance numbers and your eventual capital gains calculations. This guide walks through exactly how to record a split in EquityStat, using Tesla’s (TSLA) August 2022 3-for-1 split as a real example.

Why Recording a Split Correctly Matters

When a stock splits, your share count and price per share both change, but your total position value stays the same. Most splits, like Tesla’s, increase your share count and lower the price per share. A reverse split works the other way, decreasing your share count and raising the price per share. Tesla’s split was a 3-for-1 split, meaning for every share you owned before the split, you owned three afterward. If a split isn’t recorded, your portfolio will show the wrong share count and an inflated cost basis per share, both of which affect your reported gains or losses when you eventually sell.

How to Record a Split in EquityStat

  1. Select the stock in your investment panel.
  2. In the transaction panel, click Add to create a new transaction.
  3. In the Activity dropdown, choose Split.
  4. Enter the split ratio. For Tesla’s split, that’s 3 for 1.
  5. Click Add to save the transaction.
EquityStat Stock Portfolio tracker transaction split Tesla stock
Tesla Split Transaction

Once the split transaction is saved, EquityStat automatically adjusts every prior transaction for that stock to reflect the split. Share counts are multiplied and the price paid per share is divided accordingly, so your cost basis stays accurate without any manual recalculation.

A Real Example: Tesla’s 3-for-1 Split

Here’s what a set of Tesla transactions looked like before the split was recorded.

Tesla transactions before the split in EquityStat stock portfolio tracker.
Tesla transactions before the split.

And here’s the same set of transactions immediately after entering the split.

Tesla transactions after the split in EquityStat stock portfolio tracker.
Tesla transactions after the split

Notice the initial buy on 10/25/2018 was originally for 200 shares at $52.39 per share. After the split, that same transaction shows 600 shares at $17.46 per share, three times the shares at one-third the price. The total dollar value of the position is unchanged; only the share count and per-share price are adjusted.

Recording Splits for Other Stocks

These same steps work for any stock split, not just Tesla’s. Whenever a company you hold announces a split, select the correct stock, add a Split transaction, and enter that company’s specific split ratio (2-for-1, 3-for-1, 4-for-1, or any other ratio). EquityStat handles the share and price adjustments automatically once the ratio is entered correctly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to update my cost basis manually after a stock split? No. Once you enter the split transaction with the correct ratio, EquityStat automatically recalculates the share count and price paid for every prior transaction on that stock.

What split ratio was Tesla’s 2022 stock split? Tesla’s August 2022 split was a 3-for-1 split, meaning shareholders received two additional shares for every share they owned.

Does a stock split affect my capital gains taxes? No. A stock split changes your share count and cost basis per share, but not the total value of your position or your actual gain or loss when you eventually sell.

Google Stock Split in EquityStat

Posted on | by equitystat

Google’s (GOOG/GOOGL) stock is scheduled to split on July 15, 2022. It is a 20 for 1 stock split. So, for each share you own before the split, you get 20 shares.

If you owned Google (GOOG/GOOGL) stock before the split and you are tracking this stock in your EquityStat portfolio, how do you record the split?

First, select the Google stock in your investment panel. Next, in the transaction panel, click the Add button to add a new transaction. In the Activity drop down, choose a “Split” transaction. Enter how many shares were split, in this case it is a 20 for 1 split, and click the Add button to save the transaction.

Add a split transaction in EquityStat's investment portfolio tracker.
Adding a split transaction in your EquityStat stock portfolio tracker

When the split transaction is saved, each transaction will be adjusted to reflect this split. The number of shares will be increased twenty times and the price will be divided by twenty.

For example, if you had the following transactions before the split.

EquityStat transactions for Google (GOOG) before the 20 for 1 split
Google transactions before the split

After the split your transactions will look like this.

EquityStat transactions for Google (GOOG) after the 20 for 1 split
Google transactions after the split

Notice that before the split there were three buy transactions. After the split, the number of shares has increased 20 times and the price has been reduced by a factor of twenty. For example, the initial buy on 7/14/2021 was for a quantity of 20 shares. After the split, the purchased quantity is 400 shares. The price the shares were bought on 7/14/2021 was $2641.65. After the split, the price paid was $132.08. These adjustments are all automatically done when you enter the split transaction.

If you have other stocks that have split, you can use the same steps to record your split. Just make sure that you enter the correct split information.

Refresh User Interface For Mobile Phones

Posted on | by equitystat

We have recently refreshed the user interface of your EquityStat portfolio on mobile devices. The user interface now looks, feels and works like a mobile app. If you have ever used the Weather Channel App or the ESPN App on your mobile phone, EquityStat works very similar.

To view your EquityStat account on a mobile phone, open up the phone’s web browser, go to www.equitystat.com and login to your account.

EquityStat stock portfolio tracker on a mobile phone.
Example EquityStat Account on a Mobile Phone.

You will then see a list of all your portfolios at the top. You can swipe left at the top to scroll through all of your portfolios. Tap a “portfolio box” to see the investments in each portfolio.

To see details about a specific investment, tap the symbol for the investment. To view metrics about a specific investment tap the price button. Continue tapping the button to cycle through all of the investment metrics.

To add a new investment to your portfolio, tap the plus icon.

Splitting a Stock in EquityStat

Posted on | by equitystat

Amazon’s (AMZN) stock recently split. It was a 20 for 1 stock split. So, for each share you owned before the split, you got 20 shares.

If you owned Amazon (AMZN) stock before the split and you are tracking this stock in your EquityStat portfolio, how do you record the split?

First, select the Amazon stock in your investment panel. Next, in the transaction panel, click the Add button to add a new transaction. In the Activity drop down, choose a “Split” transaction. Enter how many shares were split, in this case it is a 20 for 1 split, and click the Add button to save the transaction.

Add a split transaction in EquityStat's investment portfolio tracker.
Adding a split transaction in your EquityStat portfolio

When the split transaction is saved, each transaction will be adjusted to reflect this split. The number of shares will be increased twenty times and the price will be divided by twenty.

For example, if you had the following transactions before the split.

EquityStat transactions for Amazon (AMZN) before the 20 for 1 split
Amazon transactions before the split

After the split your transactions will look like this.

EquityStat transactions for Amazon (AMZN) after the 20 for 1 split
Amazon transactions after the split

Notice that before the split there were three buy transactions. After the split, the number of shares has increased 20 times and the price has been reduced by a factor of twenty. For example, the initial buy on 4/02/2014 was for a quantity of 100 shares. After the split, the purchased quantity is 2000 shares. The price the shares were bought on 4/02/2014 was $341.96. After the split, the price paid was $17.098. These adjustments are all automatically done when you enter the split transaction.

If you have other stocks that have split, you can use the same steps to record your split. Just make sure that you enter the correct split information.

How to Compare Your Investment Performance to the S&P 500, Dow Jones or Nasdaq

Posted on | by equitystat

If you want to compare your investment performance to the S&P 500, the Dow Jones or the Nasdaq, EquityStat lets you add any of these indexes right onto your performance graph so you can see exactly how your investments compare to an index.

Why Compare Your Portfolio to an Index

Knowing your return in dollars only tells half the story. The real question is whether your money is doing better or worse than the broader market. A benchmark like the S&P 500 index gives you an answer you can actually act on. If your portfolio is falling behind the index quarter after quarter, that is worth investigating. If it is pulling ahead, that is worth understanding too, so you can keep doing what is working.

How to Add an Index to an Investment’s Performance Graph

Adding a benchmark takes just a few clicks.

  1. View the performance graph for the investment you want to check.
  2. Click the Indexes drop down menu in the upper left corner of the graph.
  3. Pick the index or indexes you want to see, choosing from the Dow Jones, the Nasdaq or the S&P 500. You are not limited to just one, so feel free to select more than one if you want a fuller picture.
  4. A checkmark will appear next to each index you choose, and the index line will show up right alongside your investment’s performance on the graph.

Want to remove an index later? Open the same drop down menu and click the index again. The checkmark will disappear and the line will come off your graph.

Compare Stock Performance to Indexes
Compare Investment Performance to Indexes

When you click on the Indexes drop down menu link, you can choose from a list of indexes.

Choose to compare your stock's performance to the Dow Jones index, the Nasdaq index or the S&P 500 index
Choose to compare your stock’s performance to the Dow Jones index, the Nasdaq index or the S&P 500 index

Choose the Dow Jones index, the Nasdaq index or the S&P 500 index. You can choose one index or multiple indexes. When you choose an index, you will see a checkbox next to the index.

Once an index is chosen, you will see the index in your performance graph and how it compares to your investment’s performance.

To remove an index, click on the Indexes drop down link and select the index again. This will remove the checkbox from the index menu item and remove the index from your performance graph.

How to Compare Your Account or Portfolio to an Index

You are not limited to comparing a single investment. EquityStat also lets you measure your entire account or portfolio against these same benchmarks.

To do this, go to the Tools menu and select Analyze Portfolio. On the Portfolio Analysis page, click the Indexes link above the performance graph and choose whichever index or indexes you would like to compare your portfolio against. Within moments, you will see your combined performance laid out next to the benchmark, so you can judge your overall account/portfolio strategy rather than just one position at a time.

Choose to compare your account/portfolio performance to the Dow Jones index, the Nasdaq index or the S&P 500 index
Choose to compare your account/portfolio performance to the Dow Jones index, the Nasdaq index or the S&P 500 index

Track More Than Just Price

Comparing your performance to the S&P 500, the Dow Jones or the Nasdaq is one of the simplest ways to know whether your investing approach is actually paying off. Once you have that context, you can make better decisions about what to hold, what to trim and where to put new money to work.

EquityStat and Taxes

Posted on | by equitystat

It’s that dreaded time of year – tax time. EquityStat’s portfolio manager has several tools to help investors with their taxes.

If you sold any shares last year, you can use EquityStat to generate IRS Form 8949.  IRS Form 8949 is a form that shows your short-term  and long-term capital gains on any investment sale.  EquityStat will automatically calculate these capital gains.  It will then generate a PDF of Form 8949 with all needed information that the IRS requires.  You can then give this form to your tax preparer when you are preparing your taxes.  To generate IRS Form 8949, click the Tools menu and then choose the Generate Form 8949 menuitem.

Use EquityStat To Print IRS Form 8949
IRS Form 8949 Example

Another tool to help you with your taxes is the ability to export your investment’s transactions to a spreadsheet. To export your transactions, click the Tools menu and then choose the Export Transactions menuitem. When you export your transactions, you will get a spreadsheet showing each transaction for the investment including the type of transaction it is (e.g. Buy, Sell, Dividend, etc). With this information, your tax preparer can calculate your taxable capital-gains and taxable dividends for all of your investments.

Worst Stock of 2016

Posted on | by equitystat

According to the Wall Street Journal the worst S&P 500 stock of 2016 was Endo International.  It was down 73%.

You can see the list of worst stocks here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2016/12/30/5-worst-performers-in-the-sp-500-in-2016/

How did your investments do in 2016?  What was your worst stock?  If you are not tracking your investment’s performance, consider using EquityStat.  With EquityStat you can track the overall performance of your portfolio/account as well as the performance of each individual investment.  EquityStat tracks the annualized return, year to date return, daily gain, overall gain and many other metrics of your investments.  With these metrics you can easily determine what are your best investments.

Many online brokerages and mutual funds track an individual stock or mutual fund’s performance but you cannot get the overall return of all your stocks or mutual funds.  With EquityStat not only can you get the return each investment, you can also get the return for your entire account.  This way you know how well your investments are performing at any time.

Best Stock of 2016

Posted on | by equitystat

According to the Wall Street Journal the best S&P 500 stock of 2016 was Nvdia.  It was up 224%.

You can see the list of best stocks here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2016/12/30/5-best-performers-in-the-sp-500-in-2016/

How did your investments do in 2016?  What was your best stock?  If you are not tracking your investment’s performance, consider using EquityStat.  With EquityStat you can track the overall performance of your portfolio/account as well as the performance of each individual investment.  EquityStat tracks the annualized return, year to date return, daily gain, overall gain and many other metrics of your investments.  With these metrics you can easily determine what are your best investments.

Many online brokerages and mutual funds track an individual stock or mutual fund’s performance but you cannot get the overall return of all your stocks or mutual funds.  With EquityStat not only can you get the return each investment, you can also get the return for your entire account.  This way you know how well your investments are performing at any time.

 

 

 

Portfolio Analysis – New Feature

Posted on | by equitystat

How to Analyze Your Investment Portfolio in EquityStat

EquityStat has introduced a powerful Portfolio Analysis tool that helps investors evaluate performance, track holdings, and compare returns across multiple portfolios. This feature gives you a clear, data‑driven view of how your investments are performing over time.

What the Portfolio Analysis Tool Does

The Portfolio Analysis page provides a complete performance overview of your account and individual portfolios. You can quickly see:

  • Overall account performance over time
  • Portfolio‑level performance metrics
  • Investment holdings and allocation
  • Daily, quarterly, and yearly performance rankings
  • Best‑ and worst‑performing investments

This makes it easy to understand which assets are driving your returns and where adjustments may be needed.

How to Access Portfolio Analysis in EquityStat

To run a portfolio analysis:

  1. Click the Tools menu at the top navigation bar.
  2. Select Analyze Portfolio from the dropdown.
  3. The system will generate a detailed analysis of your account and portfolios.

What You’ll See on the Portfolio Analysis Page

Analyze your investment portfolio using EquityStat.
Analyze Portfolio Example

1. Account‑Level Performance Overview

If you manage multiple portfolios, the analysis begins with a full account‑wide performance summary, including:

  • A performance graph showing account growth over time
  • A breakdown of each portfolio’s performance
  • A ranked list of investment returns
  • A summary of all holdings across your account

2. Portfolio‑Specific Analysis

Click any portfolio name in the summary table to view:

  • Portfolio‑specific performance charts
  • Individual investment metrics
  • Best and lowest performers for the day, quarter, and year
  • A complete holdings list for that portfolio

If you only have one portfolio, the system automatically displays its analysis.

Key Performance Metrics Provided

The analysis includes detailed metrics such as:

  • Total return
  • Daily return
  • Quarterly return
  • Year‑to‑date return
  • Investment rankings
  • Growth charts

These insights help you understand how each investment contributes to your overall performance.

Why This Matters for Investors

Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced investor, having a clear view of your portfolio’s performance is essential. EquityStat’s Portfolio Analysis tool helps you:

  • Track long‑term investment growth
  • Identify top‑performing investment
  • Spot underperforming investments
  • Make informed decisions based on real data
  • Manage multiple portfolios with ease
  • Track dividend income across all portfolios

Stock Portfolio Tracker FAQ 5 Common EquityStat Questions Answered

Posted on | by equitystat

This stock portfolio tracker FAQ covers the five questions EquityStat users ask most often, from adding your first investment to selling shares and customizing how your portfolio is displayed. Whether you are just getting started or have been tracking your investments for a while, these answers should help you get more out of the tool.

1. How Do I Add a New Investment?

Click the New menu, then choose New Investment from the dropdown. A popup dialog will appear where you can enter the details of your new investment, including the symbol, the number of shares, and the price. Once you save it, the investment is added to your portfolio and its price will begin updating automatically.

2. How Do I Add or Remove a Portfolio Column?

Click the Options menu, then choose Change Columns from the dropdown. The Change Columns panel will appear with two lists, Available Columns and Displayed Columns. To add a column, select it from the Available Columns list and click Add to move it into the Displayed Columns list. To remove a column, select it from the Displayed Columns list and click Remove. When you are finished, click Change to save your new column layout.

This is useful for tailoring your portfolio view to whatever matters most to you, whether that is dividend yield, annualized return, or cost basis.

3. How Do I Change the Order of the Displayed Columns?

Change your stock portfolio columns to show the metrics that matter to you

Click the Options menu and choose Change Columns, the same panel used to add or remove columns. Select the column you want to move from the Displayed Columns list, then use the up and down arrows on the right side of the panel to reposition it. Click Change when you are done to save the new order. This lets you put the metrics you check most often, such as gain or current value, right where you will see them first.

4. How Do I Sort My Portfolio by Investment Name or Any Other Column?

To sort your portfolio by investment name, click the Name column heading. The same works for any other column, including Market Value, Gain, or Return. Clicking a column heading once sorts it, and clicking it again toggles between ascending and descending order, so you can quickly see your biggest winners, your biggest losers, or your largest positions.

5. How Do I Sell an Investment?

To sell an investment, add a Sell transaction. First, select the investment you want to sell, then click the Add button in the Transactions section. A popup panel will appear where you can enter the date, choose Sell from the Activity dropdown, and enter the number of shares sold along with the price. Click Add to save your changes, and EquityStat will update your holdings and performance numbers to reflect the sale.

Still Have Questions

If this stock portfolio tracker FAQ did not answer what you were looking for, reach out through the help page for more support.

Customize Your Portfolio Tracker Columns to Track What Investment Data You Want Too Display

Posted on | by equitystat

Portfolio tracker columns are data metrics about your investments, and EquityStat just gave you two more to work with. You can now display the Ex Dividend Date and the Dividend Paid Date for every investment in your account, right alongside the rest of your holdings.

To add these columns to your portfolio, open the Options menu and choose Change Columns. A panel will drop down showing your Available Columns on one side and your Displayed Columns on the other. Find the column you want in the Available list, move it over to Displayed, and click Change. Your portfolio will refresh right away with the new metrics displaying in the portfolio grid.

These two additions join a long list of columns already built into EquityStat. Some show basic details about each investment, while others surface performance metrics you would otherwise have to calculate yourself. You can mix and match freely, adding or removing columns until your portfolio view matches exactly how you like to review your holdings.

The flexibility is really the point. No two investors track their portfolio the same way. Some want to display dividend information and others care more about cost basis or annualized return. Because EquityStat lets you reconfigure your columns whenever you want, your dashboard can shift along with your priorities instead of forcing you into one fixed layout.

Ex Dividend Date and Dividend Paid Date Columns

If you own dividend stocks, these two dates answer two very different questions. The Ex Dividend Date tells you the cutoff for owning a share and still qualifying for the upcoming payment. Buy after that date and you will have to wait for the next cycle. The Dividend Paid Date tells you when the dividend is paid, which matters if you are planning around cash flow or timing a reinvestment.

Having both sitting in your portfolio view means you no longer have to look them up one holding at a time on an outside site. You can scan down the column and see exactly where every position stands.

Other Popular Columns to Add

Ex Dividend Date and Dividend Paid Date are new, but there are other columns as well. Depending on how you like to evaluate your holdings, you might also bring in these columns.

  • Cost basis, to see what you originally paid for each position
  • Annualized return, to compare performance across investments held for different lengths of time
  • Current yield, to gauge how much income a holding is generating relative to its price
  • Unrealized gain or loss, to check where each position stands without having to sell first

None of these are required. They are simply available, and you can turn them on only if they fit how you already think about your portfolio.

How This Fits Into Tracking Your Dividend Income

Column customization pairs well with EquityStat’s Portfolio Analysis page, where you can already view dividends received over time, dividends year to date, dividends for the current quarter, and expected dividends, at either the account or the portfolio level. Adding Ex Dividend Date and Dividend Paid Date to your columns gives you the transaction level detail, while Portfolio Analysis gives you the bigger picture. Used together, they make it much easier to keep tabs on your dividend income from every angle.

Getting the Most Out of Your Column Settings

Since your column choices are not permanent, it is worth revisiting them every so often, especially after EquityStat adds something new. A quick trip to Options and Change Columns takes only a moment, and it can save you real time every single day you check your portfolio.

If you have not looked at your column settings in a while, it is worth a quick visit. You might find a metric sitting in the Available list that would save you a step every time you check your portfolio.

How to Track Your Stock’s Performance Over Time in EquityStat

Posted on | by equitystat

A single number can only tell you so much about an investment. Knowing that a stock is up twelve percent this year does not tell you whether it climbed steadily or whether it dropped hard in the spring and clawed its way back by December. To really understand how an investment has behaved, you need to see it over time, not just where it stands today.

That is what a performance graph gives you, and it is built right into the EquityStat portfolio manager for every stock, ETF, and mutual fund you track.

Why a Graph Tells You More Than a Return Percentage

A return percentage answers one question. It tells you where you ended up. It does not tell you how bumpy the ride was to get there, whether the gains came early or late, or how the investment behaved during a market pullback. A performance graph fills in that missing context. You can see the shape of an investment’s history at a glance, which makes it much easier to judge how it actually fits your goals and how comfortable you are holding it through the next downturn.

How to View a Performance Graph in EquityStat

Pulling up the graph for any investment takes only a couple of clicks.

  1. Open the portfolio that contains the investment you want to review.
  2. Click on the individual stock, ETF, or mutual fund in the investment pane.
  3. The performance graph appears at the bottom right of the screen, right next to transaction pane.
EquityStat Portfolio Manager Stock Performance Graph
Performance graph for an individual stock in the EquityStat portfolio manager, shown next to the transaction history for that investment

 

From there you can see the investment’s price movement over time without leaving the page or pulling up a separate chart tool.

Compare Your Investments to the Market

Seeing a graph in isolation only tells part of the story. EquityStat also lets you compare the performance of an individual investment against the S&P 500, the Dow Jones, and the Nasdaq indexes, so you can quickly tell whether a stock is genuinely outperforming the market or simply moving with it. This kind of comparison is one of the fastest ways to separate a truly strong pick from one that just happened to rise along with everything else.

See Your Whole Portfolio’s Performance at Once

Individual investment graphs are useful, but sometimes you want the bigger picture. EquityStat also provides summary performance graphs for your entire account, along with the same kind of market comparison against major indexes, so you can judge how your overall strategy is doing, not just how one holding is doing.

Pulling it up takes only a couple of clicks as well.

  1. Click the Tools menu at the top of the page.
  2. Choose Analyze Portfolio from the drop down menu.
  3. The account performance graph will be at the top of the page.

From there you can see how your entire account has moved over time, right alongside the same kind of index comparison available for individual investments.

Why This Matters for Long Term Investors

If you hold investments for years rather than days, a single snapshot of your returns will only tell you so much. Watching how an investment has actually moved, and how it stacks up against the broader market, gives you a much clearer sense of whether it deserves a place in your portfolio going forward. It also makes it easier to stay calm during a rough stretch, since you can see that a dip today is often just one point on a much longer line.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I see the performance graph for a specific stock in EquityStat? Open the portfolio that contains the investment, click on that investment in your list, and the performance graph will appear next to its transaction history.

Can I compare my investments to the S&P 500 or other indexes? Yes. EquityStat lets you compare the performance of an individual investment, as well as your entire portfolio, against the S&P 500, the Dow Jones, and the Nasdaq.

Does EquityStat show performance for my whole portfolio, not just one stock? Yes. In addition to graphs for individual investments, EquityStat provides a summary performance graph for your entire account.

How do I see the performance graph for my whole account? Click the Tools menu at the top of the page, choose Analyze Portfolio from the drop down menu, and the account performance graph will be at the top of the page.

Ditch the Stock Spreadsheet: A Better Way to Track Your Stock Portfolio

Posted on | by equitystat

Plenty of investors keep their stock portfolio in a spreadsheet, usually in Excel or Google Sheets. It is a familiar tool, it lets you calculate a few performance numbers on your own, and it gives you a quick way to check your net worth without logging into every brokerage site you own an account with. It also feels private, since the file lives on your own computer and nobody else can open it.

That familiarity comes at a real cost, though. Once you look closely at what an Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet cannot do, the drawbacks start to add up.

The Problem With Keeping Your Prices Current

A stock spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets is only as accurate as its most recent price update, and updating it is on you. Enter prices by hand every day and it becomes a small chore that eats a few minutes you probably would rather spend somewhere else. Try to automate it with a stock data service instead, and now you are relying on a formula or add in that can break the moment that service changes its interface or goes down for a day. Either way, you are the one responsible for keeping the numbers honest.

The Problem With Being Tied to One Computer

A spreadsheet also only exists in one place. If your Excel file lives on your home computer, you cannot pull it up at work. If you use a laptop, a desktop, and a tablet at home, the file usually lives on just one of them, and you are stuck checking your portfolio only when you happen to be sitting in front of that particular machine. Google Sheets solves some of this since it lives online, but you are still stuck rebuilding the same manual formulas and price lookups no matter which device you open it from.

A Better Way to Track Your Portfolio

EquityStat was built to solve exactly these problems. Your portfolio’s value updates on its own, since EquityStat handles pulling in near real time prices for you, so there is no more typing numbers into cells every morning and no formula to babysit the way you would in Excel or Google Sheets.

Because EquityStat lives in the cloud rather than on one hard drive or inside one Google account, you can pull up your portfolio from any computer or device with a web browser, at home, at work, on a Windows machine, a Mac, or an iPad, any time of day. You are never stuck waiting to get back to one specific desk just to check how your investments are doing.

As for the privacy concern that makes a spreadsheet feel safe, EquityStat does not ask for your brokerage passwords the way some other portfolio tools do. You enter your holdings and transactions yourself, so your login credentials for your actual brokerage accounts never leave your hands.

What You Get Beyond a Spreadsheet

Along with automatic pricing and access from anywhere, EquityStat calculates the performance metrics that are genuinely tedious to build correctly in an Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet on your own, including annualized return, year to date return, quarterly return, and average price per share. These are the same numbers serious investors want to track, without the manual formula work.

2015 8949 IRS Tax Forms Released

Posted on | by equitystat

We just released the 2015 8949 IRS tax forms. If you have sold any stocks or mutual funds in 2015, then you can generate IRS Form 8949 to calculate your gain or loss on a stock sale. EquityStat will automatically calculate your short-term gains and losses and long-term gains and losses and generate a PDF 8949 form. You can then save or print out this form and give it to your accountant or tax preparer. To generate Form 8949 click the Tools menu and then select the Generate Form 8949 menuitem.

New in EquityStat: Multiple Portfolios, Expanded Performance Metrics, and a Maximize View

Posted on | by equitystat

Managing investments effectively requires tools that are flexible, intuitive, and powerful enough to handle real-world portfolios. These enhancements to EquityStat’s Portfolio Manager adds three specific improvements: the ability to create multiple portfolios, three new performance metrics (quarterly return, P/E ratio, and dividend yield), and a Maximize Portfolio view that expands your investment list to fill more of the screen. Together, these changes make it easier to organize multiple accounts, analyze performance more deeply, and view your investment data in a cleaner, more streamlined layout.

Whether you’re tracking stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, or retirement accounts, these new features help you stay on top of your financial picture with greater accuracy and efficiency.

Create and Manage Multiple Portfolios with Ease

One of the most significant upgrades is the ability to create multiple portfolios within your EquityStat account. This feature is ideal for investors who want to separate or categorize their holdings across different accounts or investment strategies.

Why Multiple Portfolios Matter
  • Better organization – Keep your brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, and long‑term holdings separate.
  • Clearer insights – Compare performance between strategies (e.g., growth vs. income).
  • Simplified reporting – Generate cleaner summaries for taxes, advisors, or personal tracking.

How to Create a New Portfolio

You can create a new portfolio directly from the New menu by selecting New Portfolio. Once created, each portfolio can be customized with its own set of investments, performance metrics, and display preferences.

New Performance Metrics for Deeper Investment Analysis

To help investors make more informed decisions, EquityStat has added several new performance‑focused data columns:

Newly Added Metrics

  • Quarterly Return – Track short‑term performance trends and identify momentum.
  • P/E Ratio (Price‑to‑Earnings) – Evaluate whether a stock is undervalued or overvalued.
  • Dividend Yield – Quickly see which holdings generate income and how much.

These metrics can be enabled from the Options menu under Change Columns, allowing you to tailor your dashboard to the data that matters most to you.

Maximize Your Portfolio View for Better Visibility

Large portfolios can sometimes require scrolling or navigating between panes to see all your holdings. To solve this, EquityStat now includes a Maximize Portfolio feature that expands your investment list to fill more of your screen.

What Maximize Mode Does

  • Expands the investment section to show more rows at once
  • Moves the transaction section downward for a cleaner layout
  • Reduces the need for scrolling and window adjustments

This is especially useful for investors with extensive holdings or those working on smaller screens.

To activate it, click the three‑line menu icon in the upper‑left corner of your portfolio and select Maximize. You can return to the default pane layout anytime by choosing Restore.

Why These Updates Matter for Investors

These enhancements aren’t just cosmetic, they are designed to improve the way you interact with your financial data:

  • Faster decision‑making thanks to clearer metrics
  • More efficient navigation with customizable portfolios
  • Better organization for multi‑account investors
  • Improved user experience across devices

As the investing landscape becomes more complex, having a flexible and powerful portfolio tracker is essential. EquityStat continues to evolve its tools to support both new and experienced investors.

Have Ideas for Future Features?

EquityStat actively welcomes feedback from its users. If you have suggestions for new tools, metrics, or improvements, the team encourages you to reach out and share your ideas. User input plays a key role in shaping future updates.

Contact us and let us know.

 

 

 

 

Creating multiple portfolios – New Feature

Posted on | by equitystat

We recently added a new feature to your EquityStat portfolio manager. You can now create multiple portfolios for your account. Having multiple portfolios gives you the ability to group and separate your investments. For example, you can have a portfolio for your individual stocks, a portfolio for your mutual funds and a portfolio for your 401K.

To add a new portfolio click the New menu and then chose the New Portfolio menuitem from the dropdown menu.

Create a New EquityStat Portfolio
How to create a new portfolio in EquityStat

You will then see two new tabs. A tab for your current portfolio and a tab for your new portfolio.

Change Portfolio Name EquityStat
How to change the portfolio name

To edit the name of your portfolio click the pencil icon, which will display an edit box.

Edit Portfolio Name
How to edit a portfolio name.

Next type over the current portfolio name with the new portfolio name and click the Save button.

View portfolio investments
View a specific portfolio

To view the investments of each portfolio click on the portfolio’s tab. From here you can also add new investments to the portfolio as well as edit investments.

To view the view the performance all your entire account (all portfolios) click the Account Value box at the top.

To delete a portfolio first delete all the investments in the portfolio. Once the portfolio is empty, click the ‘X’ icon in the portfolio tab.

Behind the Design of EquityStat’s Portfolio Manager

Posted on | by equitystat

EquityStat’s stock portfolio tracker was built for investors by investors. As investors, we found that many portfolio managers just didn’t work the way we wanted them to. Whether the portfolio manager came from a brokerage account, a mutual fund provider, or a software company, many of them just didn’t work well. That frustration was a driving force behind building EquityStat’s portfolio manager the way we did.

Automatic Price Updates

The Problem With Manual Refreshing

One major problem with other portfolio managers is that they don’t refresh your investment prices and portfolio value automatically. To see your latest values, you have to manually refresh the page yourself, every single time you want a current number.

How EquityStat Handles It

We did not want our portfolio manager to behave this way. With EquityStat, your prices and portfolio values update automatically without you having to refresh the page. Every 15 minutes, we query the latest prices for your investments and update your portfolio accordingly. In the upper right-hand corner, we even display the last time your quotes were updated, so you always know exactly how current your data is. All of this happens automatically in the background, without you having to constantly refresh the page just to see how your investments are performing.

Background Transaction Saving

The Problem With Entering Transactions

Another common problem with other portfolio managers is entering transactions. When you enter a transaction, many portfolio managers will post it back to the web server and then do a full page refresh to show the new data. It works, but it is cumbersome, especially if you’re entering several transactions in a row.

How EquityStat Handles It

EquityStat’s portfolio manager handles this differently by doing all of the saving in the background. When you add or edit a transaction, it is saved and updated behind the scenes automatically. The only thing you’ll see is a brief notification at the top of your portfolio letting you know the transaction has been saved. The benefit is less page refreshing and a more natural, less cumbersome way of entering your investment activity, whether you are logging a single trade or updating your portfolio after a busy trading day.

Why It Matters

Small design decisions like these add up. A stock portfolio tracker that constantly needs to be refreshed, or that interrupts you every time you log a transaction, gets in the way of the thing it is supposed to help with, actually understanding how your investments are doing. Automatic price updates and background transaction saving were two of the earliest design choices we made with that in mind, and they are still core to how EquityStat works today.

How to Customize Your Portfolio Columns in EquityStat

Posted on | by equitystat

Customizing your portfolio columns is one of the easiest ways to make your investment tracking work the way you want it to. Instead of scrolling past numbers you do not care about, you can set up your view so the metrics that matter most to you are in front of you every time you log in.

Why Portfolio Columns Matter

When you first set up an account, EquityStat shows a default set of columns for your portfolio. That default view works fine for most people getting started, but every investor cares about different things. Some people want to keep a close eye on gain and loss. Others are more focused on dividend income, cost basis, or how a position compares to the overall market. Being able to change your columns means your portfolio page can be built around your own strategy instead of a one size fits all layout.

How to Change Your Portfolio Columns

Adjusting your columns only takes a minute, and you will not need to touch any settings outside of your portfolio view.

  1. Open your portfolio and click the Options link at the top of the page.
  2. Choose Change Columns from the drop down menu.
  3. You will see two lists, a list of Available Columns and a list of Displayed Columns. The Available column list is a list of column metrics you can add to your portfolio and the Displayed column list is a list of column metrics that are currently displayed.
  4. Use the lists to add columns you want, remove ones you do not need, and reorder them so the most important data sits where you will see it first.
  5. If you are not sure what a column represents, click on it and a short description will display between the two lists.
  6. Once you are happy with your setup, click Change to save your new column layout and return to your portfolio.

That is really all there is to it. You can come back and adjust your columns again at any time, so there is no need to get it perfect on the first try.

Getting the Most Out of a Custom View

A little bit of trial and error goes a long way here. If you are someone who reinvests dividends, you may want columns that make it easy to see dividend activity at a glance. If you are more focused on long term growth, you might prioritize columns tied to overall performance and cost basis instead. Because you can rearrange columns whenever you like, it is worth revisiting your setup every few months as your investing goals shift.

Final Thoughts

Taking a few minutes to set up your portfolio columns can make checking your investments a much faster and more useful habit. Rather than digging through numbers you never look at, you get a view built around what actually matters to your strategy. If you have not customized your columns yet, log into your EquityStat account and give it a try.

What Is Cost Basis? A Complete Guide for Stock Investors

Posted on | by equitystat

Cost basis is the original value of an investment for tax purposes, and it is one of the most important numbers you need to know as an investor. If you have ever wondered why your accountant asks for purchase prices and dates when you sell a stock, cost basis is the reason. Get it wrong and you could end up overpaying or underpaying the IRS.

What Is Cost Basis?

Investopedia defines cost basis as the original value of an asset, usually the purchase price, adjusted for stock splits, dividends, and return of capital distributions. That adjusted number is what the IRS compares against your sale price to figure out your capital gain or loss.

In plain terms, cost basis answers one question. How much did this investment actually cost you, once every purchase, split, and reinvestment is factored in?

Why Cost Basis Matters

The IRS requires brokers to report the cost basis on many types of investments, and you are responsible for reporting your capital gains and losses accurately on your tax return. You cannot calculate a capital gain or loss without first knowing your cost basis, so this number sits at the center of your entire tax picture for the year.

But cost basis is not only a tax number. It is also the foundation for calculating your actual return on an investment. Your return measures what you gained or lost relative to what you truly put in, and that starting point is your cost basis. Without an accurate cost basis, your return numbers will be off too, sometimes by a lot, especially once splits and reinvested dividends are in the mix.

Get your cost basis wrong and the consequences go both ways. Report it too low and you will pay more tax than you owe. Report it too high and you risk an audit down the road. Also, if your cost basis is inaccurate anywhere in your portfolio, your return calculations will quietly be wrong as well, which can lead you to misjudge how a stock is actually performing.

How to Calculate Cost Basis

Calculating cost basis looks simple at first. If you buy 100 shares of a company for $120, your cost basis is $120.

Once real life gets involved the calculation gets more complex. What happens if that stock does a 3 for 2 split? What if you buy another 50 shares a few months later at a different price? What if you reinvest capital gains distributions in the same year you also have a split and a new purchase? Each of those events changes your cost basis, and by the time you have a few years of purchases, splits, and reinvested dividends stacked on top of each other, doing this math by hand becomes genuinely difficult and easy to get wrong.

This is exactly the kind of calculation where a small tracking error early on can throw off both your tax numbers and your return numbers.

How EquityStat Makes Cost Basis Easier

EquityStat handles this calculation for you. Enter your purchases, stock splits, and capital gains as they happen, and EquityStat keeps a running, accurate cost basis for every holding in your portfolio automatically.

The same applies to dividends. EquityStat lets you record dividend transactions, including short term capital gains and long term capital gains, and it tracks reinvested dividends and reinvested capital gains separately so those re-investments are properly calculated into your cost basis.

Since EquityStat keeps this number accurate, it also uses your cost basis to calculate your investment return, giving you a true picture of how each holding is actually performing, not just an estimate based on your original purchase price.

When you are ready to sell, whether you are selling your entire position or just part of it, EquityStat calculates your gain or loss instantly. From there, you can generate IRS Form 8949, showing the cost basis for every investment you sold during the year, ready for tax season.

If you are tired of reconstructing your cost basis from old statements every April, tracking it as you go is the easier path, and it is exactly what EquityStat is built to do.

TurboTax and Investment Taxes

Posted on | by equitystat

Do you use TurboTax to calculate your investment gains and losses?  Do you use TurboTax to generate form Schedule D or Form 8949?  If so be aware that TurboTax is now charging extra for these features.

In addition to paying $59.99 for the Deluxe version of Turbo tax, if you want to calculate your investment capital gains or losses from stock, mutual fund or ETF sales you will have to pay an additional $20 or $30.

You can read more about the changes to TurboTax here.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-mh-intuits-catastrophic-turbotax-20150118-column.html

If you are looking for an alternative to TurboTax for calculating your capital gains or losses, checkout EquityStat.  With EquityStat you can generate IRS Form 8949 .  Form 8949 is used to report your short and long term capital gains and loses.  Once you enter your purchases and sales of your investments into EquityStat, you can then generate Form 8949 and use this form to fill out your Schedule D Form.

Investments, Taxes, Form 8949, Schedule D

Posted on | by equitystat

Selling Investments and the IRS

The IRS is requiring more reporting when you sell your investments.  Specifically, they require you to report the investment cost, cost basis in investment terminology, and the gain/loss from the investment sale.  If you purchase 100 shares of a stock and sell 100 shares of the stock, your cost basis is easy to calculate.  Things get more difficult when you purchase shares in different lots.  For example, you purchase 100 shares in 2011, 50 shares in 2012, 200 shares in 2013 and sell 160 shares in 2014.

Form 8949

What is your cost basis in the above scenario?  This is not an easy calculation to do.  To make things even more difficult, you have to report both your short term gains and long term gains to the IRS separately.  Fortunately, EquityStat makes this easy.  EquityStat calculates your cost basis for each investment and can also generate IRS Form 8949 which is a report that shows your gain/loss on each investment sold.  Your tax preparer can then use Form 8949 to create the IRS Schedule D form.

To Generate Form 8949, click the Tools menu at the top of the portfolio and then click the Generate IRS Form 8949. Choose your tax year and EquityStat will generate the report showing both your short term and long term gain/loss on each investment you sold during the tax year.

 

 

 

How did your investments do in 2014?

Posted on | by equitystat

According to the Wall Street Journal the best stock of 2014 was Southwest Airlines (LUV).  It was up 123%.  The worst stock of 2014 was Transocean (RIG).  It was down 62%.

You can see the list of best stocks here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2014/12/31/5-best-stocks-of-2014/

You can see the list of worst stocks here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2014/12/31/5-worst-stocks-of-2014/

How did your investments do in 2014?  What was your best stock?  What was your worst?

If you are not tracking your investment’s performance, consider using EquityStat.  With EquityStat you can track the overall performance of your portfolio as well as the performance of each individual investment.  EquityStat tracks the annualized return, daily gain, overall gain and many other metrics of your investments.  With these metrics you can easily determine what are your best investments and what are your worst investments.

Why Mutual Fund Investors Need a Portfolio Tracker

Posted on | by equitystat

If you own mutual funds, you might wonder why you would need a separate portfolio tracker at all. Does your mutual fund not already show you everything, your transaction history, your performance, your return for the year? In practice, the tools most funds provide leave real gaps, and those gaps can cost you at tax time and give you a distorted picture of how your investment is actually doing.

The Problem With Your Mutual Fund’s Transaction History

Many mutual funds do not keep your full transaction history available to you. Some only show up to three years back, so if you have owned a fund longer than that, a chunk of your own buying and selling history is simply out of reach.

That missing history matters for two reasons. First, if you sell shares in a mutual fund, you need a complete record of your purchases to report your gain or loss to the IRS accurately. A partial history can lead to a partial, and potentially wrong, tax report. Second, a full history lets you track how your investment has actually performed over the entire time you have owned it, not just the last few years the fund happens to display.

The Problem With Your Mutual Fund’s Reported Return

Mutual funds typically report a single yearly return figure, but that figure is not necessarily your return. It reflects the change in the fund’s share price from the start of the year to the end, regardless of when you personally bought in.

Here is a simple example. Say a hypothetical mutual fund, ticker XRXRXR, trades at 100 dollars a share on January 1 and closes the year at 110 dollars a share. The fund reports a 10 percent gain for the year. Now say you actually bought your shares on July 1 at 90 dollars a share. Based on that closing price of 110 dollars, your real gain is closer to 22 percent, not 10. Or say you bought in later at 120 dollars a share. Based on that same 110 dollar closing price, you are actually down about 8 percent, even though the fund itself reported a 10 percent gain for the year. Relying on the fund’s headline number alone can leave you thinking you did better, or worse, than you really did.

How a Portfolio Tracker Solves Both Problems

A dedicated portfolio tracker like EquityStat keeps your complete transaction history for as long as you use it, with no three year cutoff. That full record means you always have what you need to report gains or losses accurately, and EquityStat can generate IRS Form 8949 directly from that same transaction data when it comes time to calculate the gain or loss on any mutual fund shares you sell.

EquityStat also calculates your annualized return based on the actual dates you purchased and sold your shares, not on the fund’s own start of year to end of year snapshot. That means the return you see reflects what you personally earned, not just what the fund’s share price happened to do over the calendar year.