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.