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by woodpanel 2834 days ago
Hi Daniel, neat site and I'm really happy someone is taking this on! As the OP noted, the killer feature for me to choose GoogleFinance (GF) above all other "free equities tracking websites" [1] was its portfolio.

I've just tried to see if your site addresses those pain points and it doesn't - but I think you're halfway there.

What OP's "hypothetical portfolio" means is basically the tracking of a whole set of selected equities (so in your site's case: the performance of everything within a watchlist, including a graph visualizing it plus all the common features like comparing that portfolio-graph to that of the Nasdaq, Dollar Index, BTC ...). [2]

GF's UI was horrible, but they allowed to create endless amounts of those portfolios, which was really helpful for finding one's investment strategy because you could compare "ideas". Or you could gather groups of similar equities to track their performance and decide whether they are ripe for becoming "a new idea" (like "I believe that downturn of x is at some point going to halt, maybe then it's worth investing")

When GF still had its portfolio feature, I hoped their "re-design" would allow for more mobile-friendliness (which you address) but more importantly comparing portfolio graphs with each other.

Also, as non-American I repeatedly ran into trouble finding an equivalent ticker sign for non-US equities [3]. Supporting WKN or ISIN would be an improvement over GF!

Anyways, quitting your job for this is a bold step and I wish you the best!

[1] Putting that label in quotes maybe highlights the fringeness of that niche and why Google shut it down :-(

[2] To be clear: not a graph where i have all the graphs of the items of a watchlist - but one line for all items combined

[3] My trouble was usually resolved, finding some European stock's ADR and converting the EUR amount invested to the amount of ADRs i'd have gotten in USD

4 comments

> What OP's "hypothetical portfolio" means is basically the tracking of a whole set of selected equities (so in your site's case: the performance of everything within a watchlist, including a graph visualizing it plus all the common features like comparing that portfolio-graph to that of the Nasdaq, Dollar Index, BTC ...). [2]

> GF's UI was horrible, but they allowed to create endless amounts of those portfolios, which was really helpful for finding one's investment strategy because you could compare "ideas". Or you could gather groups of similar equities to track their performance and decide whether they are ripe for becoming "a new idea" (like "I believe that downturn of x is at some point going to halt, maybe then it's worth investing")

I just want to second this point made in the parent comment. What I've always wanted to do that I can't really do in an app out there, is compare my "what-if" scenarios (e.g. what if I had held onto 20% of my AAPL in 2015, instead of selling and buying NFLX and UA/UAA?). I always imagined that there'd be an easy visualization comparison between two scenarios, to allow me to "evaluate" certain buy/sell decisions I've made, retrospectively.

This is a super helpful set of points. I've always had similar questions to your AAPL/NFLX/UA examples. I think the insight here, is that brokerage accounts and most sites treat your "list" as binary - you either "own"/"track" something or you don't.

In reality, you're tracking a lot of opportunities, and every decision you've made represents several different scenarios. It should be as easy to look back on a scenario (AAPL versus NFLX+UA performance over the last 3 years) as it is to see the performance of any of those specific securities.

You should also be able to easily see that your "biotech" list outperformed your actual portfolio, or that your "tech" list is outperforming your "European companies" list (or whatever else).

We probably won't go too deep into backtesting various strategies, as there is powerful software for that today, but we definitely can support the analyses in this thread.

I think Excel would be the best tool for that type of analysis, not an app.
An app would be a lot nicer to get a graph of performance offer time for that hypothetical decision. Excel would be okay if you just wanted to know today’s position of various decisions.
Thanks and: Yes, absolutely this.

Since GF's portfolio feature is gone I've never found a way to visualize to me, that my thinking in the past was stupid/correct.

Yeah, this is awesome. We absolutely need to have that.

I appreciate the points about ISIN and tickers. We'll need to be thoughtful about how we handle that, and definitely should support more than just the U.S. exchange tickers.

As of right now, Yahoo Finance has the same watchlist functionality, but with more data than Google Finance including options and crypto and much more powerful charting and native mobile apps. You can even link your real brokerage account for real-time portfolio tracking and trading directly from their apps and site.

(If I sound like a shill, I work for https://trade.it which provides broker API functionality to Yahoo Finance, but I have also been trading and using Yahoo Finance for over a decade, way before I ever became technologically involved with them)

I'd also like to echo that having a portfolio tracker would be for me a the killer feature. I have a mix of equities and mutual funds purchased at different times and different prices and I really just want to input the purchase dates / amounts and then have a single place to track performance. GF had this and now it's all gone.

I'd pay some amount of $ per month (or year or whatever) to just have a reasonable portfolio tracker. Yes, the brokerages all have this - and they're all pretty terrible.

If you don't mind using a windows application you can give https://www.stockportfolioorganizer.com a go it does what you need and much more like allowing you to paper trade, divide into different groups, write formulas etc.

Disclaimer: I am the author.

Thanks for the reply. I really only use windows for video games at this point. Looks like a cool app though. Have you thought about converting it? Some of these web frameworks have higher level wimp apis now.
This is more portfolio tracking centered... https://stockdaddy.io/
Thanks - this is exactly what I was looking for. They never show up in search results - some SEO would be great for them.