How can I compare my portfolio to an index?

To compare against an index you'll want to create a new investment to track whatever index you'd like to compare against.  You may want to create a new sub-portfolio to put these indices in.  You can put the indices sub-portfolio at the same level as your sub-portfolio, so you can report on them separately, but see both on the same report or graph.  To get ROI yields out of the index you would need to record a purchase on or before the earliest date you'd like yields for.  A purchase of $1 will work fine, the amount of the purchase does not matter.

Besides reports, you can also graphically compare your portfolio against any indices using the "Graphs / Portfolio/Investments Overlay" graph types.  To choose the overlaid portfolio/investments, see "Graphs / Options / Overlaid Portfolios and Overlay Investments".

The Advisor version offers the Executive Summary report, where you can choose any indices you want to compare against your portfolio.  This report uses Time-Weighted Returns (TWR) for calculating performance on the indices, so it is not necessary to own any shares of the index.

The Professional and Advisor versions offer the ability to create an automatically updated "blended" investment, which can be used to create a custom index.  This feature allows you to make a new investment (index) based off specified percentages of existing investments (indices).  See "File / File Operations / Create Blended Investment...".

To find the symbols used by Yahoo for many of the most common indices, see their list of indices.

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