What I Personally Use to Track My Investments
By Dr. Steve Sjuggerud Monday, April 21, 2014
“How do you track your investments?”
“You tell us to use “trailing stops”… but how do you track them?”
“What do you personally use for investment charts and data?”
I get asked these questions all of the time.
Two truths…
- We pay six figures a year in data and software, but…
- You can do most of what we do for very little money.
And today, I’ll show you how…
It is true that we pay over $100,000 each year simply for data. (We typically get data from Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters Datastream, GlobalFinancialData.com, SNL Financial, and more.)
However, you don’t have to do this…
Most of the time, we don’t use our expensive toys… because there are quicker ways to get what we need, with simpler tools. Even better, most of these simple tools are either free, or very inexpensive.
Let me show you…
For example, for a quick check of financial news, we go to www.Bloomberg.com. For very quick looks at stocks, we actually still use Yahoo Finance (just because we’re used to it).
To track our Trailing Stops every day, we use TradeStops.com. It sends out e-mail alerts when our trailing stops are hit. There’s a free Trailing Stops Calculator on the site, and you can try the TradeStops service free for a month. We liked TradeStops.com so much, our publisher invested in it. We use it every day.
We use Microsoft Excel for a lot of things. And we have a couple (free and inexpensive) add-ons that we really like…
We use XLQ to track portfolios on Excel. XLQ brings all kinds of stock data into Excel. It’s not just price data – it has fundamental data, trailing-stop data, and more. It is really quite extraordinary. If you are an Excel user, then you must check it out. You can try it for free for 45 days, and it’s very reasonably priced beyond that.
When we need data beyond stock data, a great source that we rely on is the St. Louis Federal Reserve. The St. Louis Fed’s website is incredibly easy to use – and it’s free! Even better, if you’re an Excel user, the St. Louis Fed has a fantastic free Excel Add-In that brings its data and charting capabilities directly into your Excel sheet.
All of these things are self-updating as well… When you open your Excel sheet, they update themselves with the latest data.
We do pay BIG MONEY for a mountain of data.
But we could do 90% of what we do with what I’ve shared with you above… and most of it is either free or very inexpensive.
These are truly the actual tools we use every day.
If you were curious about what we rely on – what we use to track the markets and our stocks, and to do our jobs well – then the secret is out. Now you know.
Check ’em out…
Good investing,
Steve