These directions are specific to the portfolios that are being shared. I likely will build a “public” version and link to it if someone else wants to leverage it.
The Google Sheets application is easily installed on your ipad or iphone. From there you should just click on it and select your portfolio.
Alternatively, you could open it up on the web by going into Google and signing in and then bringing up the “sheets” application from Google Docs.
When you open the spreadsheet, there is a disclaimer that the financial data is updated 20 minutes late. You can click on the “x” on the bottom to make this disclaimer go away.
Every time you open the application it will attempt to go out to the web and update all of the stock prices. The prices are in several places (including the “text” under the current price on sold items) so it may take a little bit of time on portfolios with lots of stocks.
The tab that tells the story and history of all the stocks, the cash, investment to date, dividends, and sales is the “summary” tab. This is the tab to look at if you want to see and study the entire picture.
Note that for any application, if you open it up on your phone or your ipad, you can resize the screen and it automatically zooms in or out. This is a great feature and recommended. If you look at it on your PC or Mac you need to zoom in or out by using the zoom function or + / – depending on how your machine is set up. Or you can just use your mouse or arrow tab to get around.
Day to day, I recommend looking at the “analytics” tab. There are multiple tabs in the sheet and it may or may not open up to that tab first. You can just click on the tab at the bottom for that one to come up.
The analytics tab has all of your stocks. You can see how the portfolio has changed that day. Increases are automatically in green and decreases are in red. The increases and decreases are in percentage term and in dollar terms (your net gain or loss for the day). At the bottom of the analytics column you can see the total change across all of your stocks for the day.
In the box below the green / red section of your stocks on the analytics tab, there are 3 other benchmarks. The first one is the S&P 500 index. The second benchmark is for the non US stocks (unhedged, so it contains both stock price performance and the impact of currency changes). The third benchmark is the US dollar vs a basket of foreign currencies, which shows the direction of whether the US dollar is going up or down. Generally, if the US dollar goes up, there is a decrease in the value of your foreign stocks.
To the left on the analytics sheet, there are 4 items in a different box. They start with the % of your stocks that are US vs. foreign, the % of your portfolio that is tied to the largest sector, the % of your portfolio that is in high dividend stocks (about 3% or more in dividend yield) and the % of your total portfolio that is in cash (not invested in stocks).
You can also see the 52 week high and low and the % of 52 week high that the stock is currently at. 100% would be the highest value and stocks in the 90% means that they are near or testing a 52 week high.
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