Portfolio Manager Apps & What They Do

In 2023, according to a Gallup survey, around 58% of US residents own stocks. Unfortunately, 53% of this type of securities, worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $19 billion, get held by 1% of the American population. Nevertheless, interest in stock trading has steadily risen since 2017, and it still has a while to go before reaching the peaks obtained in this sector in the early-2000s.

One tool that will go a long way in helping global trading become more popular than ever is portfolio management software. For those unfamiliar with these virtual trading assistants, they are applications designed to help people manage their investment portfolios. They aid in tracking securities’ prices, monitoring the performance of holdings, and more. They do all this for traders to make more informed investment decisions. To accomplish this, they use real-time market data supplied by various news outlets and exchanges and implement analysis instruments, like tried-and-tested metrics, charting functions, etc. These give investors the information needed to customize their held assets by indirectly suggesting which investments they should add or remove, essentially, how to rebalance. Plus, they advise on optimizing users’ tax practices.

Some famous stock-tracking apps also implement social features that let users share investment strategies/ideas and chat about current US and global market happenings. In short, a portfolio manager app is an invaluable digital helper for experienced and novice traders that will undoubtedly help them manage their portfolios more effectively. Below, we look at some of their primary features, elaborating them in more detail, which, in most cases, go a long way in investors attaining steady streams of positive returns.

Portfolio Tracking – Watchlists

Portfolio managers also sometimes get called investment trackers or trade tracking software. That is so because monitoring trades is the core of these apps. They do this by letting users integrate these trackers with their brokerage accounts, automatically pulling their investment data (QIF, OFX, and CSV files) from these sources. That means that once they do this, they can view their transaction history, current holdings, and other valuable data from one place (in their portfolio tracker) without entering this info manually. Naturally, if that is not possible, manual entry is an option. If you want to test out how data pulls work, from StockMarketEye.com, you can download a free portfolio manager, a highly-rated one by sector experts.

Like many of its competitors, it has a watchlist feature, allowing users to fashion custom lists of stocks they are curious about and would like to monitor, potentially interested in purchasing them in the future. They can group these by industry or bundle specific companies together. The stock tracking app gathers real-time data from stock exchanges, public data feeds, and market data providers like Reuters, Morningstar, and Bloomberg, triggering previously set alerts, notifying about shifts in prices, and other vital data points that investors have told the application they want to know about as they occur.

On top of these options, some apps also have multiple analysis and research tools integrated within the watchlist functions. These provide access to financial reports, news articles, and insider’s opinions on the tracked stocks. They also have comparison models that stack up observed securities against each other, looking for patterns and trends.

Charting Functions

Anyone into finance knows the importance of charts. They have the ability to swiftly convey the relationships between multiple sets of data in a simple-to-understand format. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and dozens of studies have shown that illustrative data is super effective for communicating in business. That particularly holds when one must scan through past track records.

Investment trackers customarily employ a wide range of charting functions that permit users to better understand trends and performance by looking at visual displays. That happens in these applications via line, candlestick, bar, and area charts. At least, those are the traditional picks most traders opt for and understand. On these, trackers can overlay technical indicators, meaning mathematical calculations applied to the price of a security or its trading volume so that investors can better estimate future price movements. The indicators readers are most likely to know are moving averages, Bollinger bands, the relative strength index, the MACD (moving average convergence divergence), and the Fibonacci retracements. The mentioned StockMarketEye tracker has these, along with several others (fourteen in total), and it features customization options that let everyone adjust the periods displayed on their charts. It can even add multiple stocks to one chart for comparison-sake.

The created ones get modified organically, as they get fed real-time data updates from official or credible sources. Hence, they continuously depict the current state of affairs. Though the choice for users to roll back the time frame used to look for historical sequences always exists. That makes the visualization of a security’s journey from its inception to the current day a breeze. The charts can also be put side by side with tables, used to assess the market value of a portfolio when compared to any benchmark, and more.

Investment Portfolio Reports

Instead of working with a broker or a dedicated portfolio manager and getting periodical phone calls/emails from them that provide information about the state of held assets and an outlook on one’s overall investment venture, a portfolio tracker can do this at any time. The premium choices on the market usually condense data into six different report types. They are:

·        Allocation Report – It aims to make traders understand how much risk they have incurred and where asset allocation modifications must get done. That gets conveyed through a pie chart paired with raw percentages and detailed data. Plus, additional categories are in play here that give recommendations for maximizing growth.

·        Summary Report – This one is self-explanatory. It is nothing more than a record displaying cash flows, historic market values, and much more, viewed with custom period ranges set or with values for the present situation.

·        Gain/Loss Report – It generates an overview regarding where trades have lost/gained in value in their trading voyage, giving investors data from the first stock held to the last one, with open/close info on these, among other things.

·        Transaction Report – It has all the present and past transfers from one’s portfolio and investment strategies in one statement that users can view utilizing custom filters to dissect. That lets everyone gain deep insights from presented values like TWRR/IRR, total return, and gains/losses, which can lead to improving investment approaches.

·        The Total Return Report – In essence, this is the summary report, but with slightly less-comprehensive analysis options. 

·        Back-in-Time Report – If one does not know his history, he may be bound to repeat his mistakes. To avoid that, it is handy that everyone generates back-in-time reports and analyzes the historical performance of their trades, along with all their corresponding values at specific points in time.

Online Backup and Synchronization

In the majority of portfolio manager apps, like the already cited StockMarketEye, data gets held on a person’s computer. So to make use as convenient as possible, these services traditionally deliver free online synchronization. That means trading info can get shared from one device to other computers and iOS/Android-powered tablets and smartphones. It also can get easily backed up online.

For those wondering how secure this process is? It gets encrypted using Secure Sockets Layer, SSL ciphering technology, and company servers, in the case of StockMarketEye, get encrypted using the AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) 256-bit protocol. And when synchronization gets completed, the authentication process gets performed using a secure token, eliminating the need for anyone to store a password on the device when the data has gotten transferred over.

Earn Rewards for Referring People to Use Stock Trackers

Affiliate marketing is a sizable business sphere these days, with traditional advertising methods falling by the wayside due to the emergence of social media and the degree that these communication networks have seeped into our lives. Thus, it should come as no surprise that virtually every sphere is now implementing affiliate programs, investment tools included.

At best, users of portfolio trackers or those who only wish to promote these software instruments can earn up to 50% per new sale subscription. Though most often, this percentage is around the 20%-mark. Anyone can be an affiliate these days. And the developers of stock trackers, like everyone else engaged in this marketing practice, have created varied promotional materials they hand over to affiliates to help them gain referrals through their use. Also, portfolio manager app brands traditionally have dedicated support teams for affiliates active 24/7 while also giving them dedicated dashboards and various tools to track their affiliate undertaking.

To Sum Up

In an era before the 2000s, portfolio managers were finance professionals responsible for handling investments on behalf of organizations and individual clients. Post-2000, this role slowly started to get assumed by software tools. These are ones that go under several monikers, including trade tracking apps, stock trackers, and more. The gist of any application categorized under one of these labels is that they provide multiple features that have not become indispensable for even casual investors. These include performance analysis, securities tracking, risk management advice, market alerts, etc. By leveraging the technology available, traders nowadays can be more in tune with everyday market happenings and how these reflect their held assets or future moves. That, without argument, will lead them to make more knowledge-based decisions, which shall increase their odds of generating positive returns.

In 2023 and beyond, only those foolishly approaching investing would forgo paying the monthly/annual fees necessary for attaining the services of a top-shelf tracker, as the value for money these applications deliver far exceeds their fixed or commission-based price tags.