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Old 03-11-2018, 11:53 AM
Arty Arty is offline
 
Join Date: Jul 2012
Location: one Fort or another
Posts: 768
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Best is to use your own custom spreadsheet ( or relational database if you have lots going on ) with appropriate calculation cells set up. Just enter daily close or intraday securities prices from a near real-time source such as TD Waterhouse or yahoo-finance, and dividend payouts from morningstar, and probable interest-rate movements from various finance sites, and various sources of regional and industry-related economic data.

It will give you a lot better idea of where you stand and where things are going, using criteria that matter. And it allows you to set up 'what if' scenarios to see how things could progress through to expiry of some complex strateg(ies).

Many broker's sites will have a display which implicitly tempts you to do things not in your best interest, to increase their brokerage fees (surprise, surprise). For example, you might get a day-to-day pie chart vividly showing how the 'value' of one account swings up and down on a day-to-day basis. You might see that you're down 10% overall for the week, which they hope might trigger some 'o-my-god' response to do a whole bunch more trading to avoid further loss after something has already bottomed. And then try to regain any lost ground by desperately doing a whole lot more trading to recoup losses, which of course won't work. But it nicely pads their brokerage fee income for the month.

Another useless or worse feature is calculating account positions based on current bond 'market' prices, rather than face value plus total coupon at expiry. For the vast majority of people who are not bond traders and have no intention of doing anything but holding any bond to expiry.

Further, if you have worked so hard every day in your career job to be able to save a little bit of after-tax income for investing, then you owe it to yourself to take care of those investments and track what's going on. Sort of like paying 70K for a new truck and actually doing proper maintenance on it. And if something looks really grim or promising over the long haul, you should do something about it.

For example, lots of companies dropped in market value a couple of years back when the oil price crashed. If you didn't have defensive positions on long positions and just thought 'i'm only in it for the nice dividends over the next 20 years anyways', then you got a big surprise when companies slashed or eliminated dividends entirely. You have to pay attention to what's going on every day, and track it all properly, but resist 95% of all impulses to do something about it. That's the game.
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