Online Investing Hacks

Build an Online Portfolio

Before you can use online portfolio tools to track your investments, allocate your assets, or rebalance your portfolio, you must create an online portfolio of your holdings.

To build an online portfolio, gather your most recent investment account statements. Keep this information handy in case you need to obtain specific information in a later step. If you have only a few holdings in your portfolio, it’s easy to build an online portfolio by entering the ticker symbols and numbers of shares for your stocks and mutual funds. If you have a larger portfolio and track your holdings in a spreadsheet or a financial application such as Quicken, you can build your online portfolio by uploading your information.

Tip

After you build your portfolio, manage it using tools described in [Hack #65] , [Hack #65] , [Hack #67] , [Hack #76] , and [Hack #77] .

The steps for building a portfolio at Morningstar.com (http://www.morningstar.com) are similar to those at most other sites, so we’ll use it as an example. You must register on the web site first, but registration is free. Morningstar offers two methods for creating a portfolio. The Quick Portfolio requires only ticker symbols, shares, and basic purchase information, which is adequate for most investors and most purposes. For example, you can watch for stocks to reach target prices, and review portfolio growth and allocation. The Transaction Portfolio, on the other hand, tracks details of buys, sells, splits, dividends, ...