Beginning a mock subportfolio

[sollner]

Hi Mark,
I apologize as this must be something covered in lots of places, but I can't find the words to describe it properly, so searches haven't helped me. What I want to do is to set up a mock subportfolio, without actually owning the stocks, so that I can see how a newsletter has performed over the last year. I know what stocks I need to enter as new investments, but without a lot of digging I don't know what the initial stock price should be. FM demands that I enter a price when setting up the new investment, so I picked $1. Then I updated the investment to today's date with a historical quote server, then edited the price of the initial entry to that of the next day, which is a little off, but not much. The problem is that the initial entry of $1 still appears as OOP Historical Basis, so the yields are all off.

Again, this must be something that everyone is doing, but I don't seem to be able to get it right. Any help greatly appreciated. --Gerry

[Mark]

Hi Gerry,

If you want to be able to calculate ROI for a sub-portfolio, you do need to own shares in the investments. The value of each investment affects its weight in the sub-portfolio. When creating the new investments, you can create them with a price of $1, and shares of 0. This way, you aren't recording a buy. You can then retrieve historical prices, and then afterwards record whatever buy you think is appropriate to get the weighting you want. If you want equal weighting of all investments, record equal valued buy transactions, for whatever share quantity works for the price on that date.

If you've already set up investments, you can edit them. You don't have to start over. It sounds like you probably have a purchase of $1. You can just edit this in the Data Register. Also check all your closing prices in the Data Register. Notice there is an "All Transactions" and "Prices" data type. You'd want to use both of those to look at your pricing history as well as your transactions.

So as to not affect your own real sub-portfolio values, you can put this "newsletter" sub-portfolio under a different hierarchy. Something like this:

Code: Select all

- Master Portfolio
  - My Holdings
    - Acct 1
    - Acct 2
  - Newsletters
    - News 1
    - News 2

[sollner]

Hi Mark,

I tried both methods (0 shares initially and editing what I entered) and was able to get things to work nicely.

Many thanks!
Gerry