Plenty of investors keep their stock portfolio in a spreadsheet. 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 a spreadsheet cannot do, the drawbacks start to add up.
The Problem With Keeping Your Prices Current
A stock spreadsheet 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 it exists 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.
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.
Because EquityStat lives in the cloud rather than on one hard drive, 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 a 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.