historical prices and private investment

[realbg]

Hello, I am new to the software and would like to get some help.

1) Historical prices
I started booking my portfolio into FundManger software today, but my portfolio holdings are are about 2 years old. I have booked my investment purchases (for example, buy 100 shares at $2 in Jan 6, 2008, buy 200 shares at $1 in Oct 20, 2008, sold 100 at $1.5 in Jun 1, 2009) but on my P&L I do not get annual or 3-months return. I think it is becasue there is no record of historical prices. Say, if I want to kno 3 month return starting from Oct 15, 2009 to Jan 15, 2009, then do I have to manually input the price in Oct 15 and Jan 15? Is there any way to automate this?

2) Private investment.
Some of my holdings are private meaning that there are no daily prices. At the end of each month, I can come up with estimate of market price. What is the best way to reflect these prices to encorporate returns of private investment to total P&L return?

3) Foreign stocks
I have some foreign stocks that Yahoo does not support. I can get the price daily but I do not have automatic feed. Could you please teach me how I can book these prices? It will be the best if I can input 2 weeks of prices at one time instead of booking the prices daily.

Thank you.

[Mark]

Hi realbg,

1) Yes, you would want to retrieve historical prices. Just select the "HST" button on the toolbar, or choose "Edit / Internet Retrieve / Historical Prices". This will prompt you for a date range to retrieve, and then go get all those prices. By default, it gets them from Yahoo (Historical), but you can adjust this under "Options / Internet Settings..." if you need to.

Also, if you want a yield from Oct 15 to Jan 15, you would want prices recorded on Oct 14 (since this close is the starting point on Oct 15) and Jan 15.

2&3) You can manually enter prices that aren't available on any of our quote servers. Use the menu commands under "Edit / Investment Data / Update Price", or use the Data Register (Edit / All Data...) and select the "Prices" data type. Also, many foreign stocks can be retrieved from servers other than Yahoo. Bloomberg supports many of these. You can set the quote server on a per-investment basis under "Investment Properties... / Internet Retrieve".