TradeTrakker

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Monitor and analyze your stock and mutual fund portfolios.

TradeTrakker is a portfolio management and tracking application that is available on a 30-day trial basis from Rose City Software. If you decide to keep using the program after 30 days, you can purchase a license for $34.95.

Data Entry

The first time you run TradeTrakker, you are prompted to add stocks to the preconfigured "Sample Portfolio." By default, the Wizard will run each time you open the program, prompting you to add any stocks or mutual funds. If you wish, you can disable this option.

The Wizard provides step-by-step prompts for you to enter in the relevant information regarding your portfolio. TradeTrakker tracks stocks from most of the major world exchanges. This includes ticker symbol, purchase price, number of shares, and date of purchase.

The data entry process is menu-driven and very user friendly, which makes setting up your portfolios or watchlists very easy.

Once you have added stocks to a portfolio or watchlist, there are a number of properties you can specify for each of your holdings. If you wish, you can even specify the group to which a stock or mutual fund belongs. The only drawback is that all groups are user-defined. It would be nice if the program offered predefined sector or industry groups. You can also enter comments for stocks in a portfolio or watchlist, which makes the program a trading journal too.

Multiple Portfolios and Watchlists

With TradeTrakker, you can monitor multiple portfolios or watchlists, with no limit as to how many you can create. Beyond merely tracking symbols, TradeTrakker allows you to follow up to 50 different parameters related to your holdings, including buy and sell, gains and losses, stock splits, dividends, and total portfolio values for short and long positions. TradeTrakker can also track up to 100 key market indexes.

If you are tracking multiple portfolios, TradeTrakker can show a summary view for several portfolios at once, provided the selected portfolios use the same base currency. TradeTrakker allows you to schedule data updates, from once a day to once a minute. By default, the data in the program is delayed 20 minutes. If you wish to retrieve real-time quotes for the stocks in your portfolio-albeit it one at a time-TradeTrakker provides a link to FreeRealTime.com (free registration required).

For each portfolio you create, you can specify the data columns displayed for the stocks and mutual funds in that particular portfolio. Beyond daily price change and volume data items, you can also display yield, price-earnings ratio, market cap, number of days held in the portfolio, and more.

Alerts

With TradeTrakker, you can set alerts based on stock price or volume. Furthermore, these alerts can be announced with Microsoft Agent text-to-speech.

Customizable Links

TradeTrakker allows you to customize links to stock news, charts, SEC filings, and even your own personal online trading account(s) directly from the main program window.

Overall

I found TradeTrakker to be extremely user friendly, a feature lacking from many investment programs these days. For most investors, having delayed data updates is not an issue. If you are looking for real-time portfolio updates, you will want to look elsewhere, as you are only able to retrieve real-time quotes one at a time and can't update the entire portfolio in real time. Having 30 days to try out the program is also a welcome feature. For many investors, the level of flexibility the program provides makes its $35 price tag well worth it.

TradeTrakker 2.8
Rose City Software
www.rosecitysoftware.com
Systems: Windows 2000 or higher, including Windows 7 (32- and 64-bit versions); 10M of free hard drive space; Internet connection
Price: $34.95 (free 30-day trial)

Available here at the AAII Download Library.