All Collections
Accounts
Special accounts
How to track traditional investments?
How to track traditional investments?

MoneyWiz allows you to track investments in stocks and will automatically update the current market price for you!

Iliya Yordanov avatar
Written by Iliya Yordanov
Updated over a week ago

This guide explains how to create an investment account, where you can track investments or retirement accounts such as brokerage accounts, commodities trading, 401k, IRA and others – basically any account that trades (Buy or Sell) any type of securities. You can track your investments manually (entering the buys and sells yourself) or connect it to the powerful Online Banking feature to sync that information automatically.

The following screenshot shows a sample account. It was taken on a Mac but the same feature is available on other platforms!

Disclaimer

MoneyWiz is not meant to be a trading platform – it doesn’t allow you to trade, it doesn’t give you advice what to trade. It’s a monitoring tool, meaning it just monitors your balances and helps you understand how they change and how they affect your overall Net Worth.

MoneyWiz support team is happy to help you with any questions you might have regarding this feature but we are not allowed to give advice on what or when to trade and will not provide guidance on that. Any investment decisions you make are entirely yours – so are both the gains and losses that your decisions result in. We take no responsibility for those.

Two ways of tracking your portfolio

There are two ways to track an investment account in MoneyWiz:

Automatic (via Online Banking)

We support over 3500 trading institutions. If your institution is supported, you can connect to it to automatically retrieve current balance, current holdings and past transactions. The full list of supported institutions is only available in the application itself – download the free version of MoneyWiz and search the list for yours!

Manual

In case your institution is not supported or you prefer not to connect to it via our Online Banking feature, you can manage your investments manually. You’ll be able to add buy, sell and other types of operations manually and still track the current worth of your capital.

For manual trading tracking we support accounts in any currency and any stock exchange and trading symbol that you can find on the Yahoo! Finance service – not just the New York Stock Exchange. This means that if you can find information on your stock exchange and stock symbols in Yahoo! Finance service, you will be able to manage it manually in MoneyWiz. Once you download MoneyWiz, be sure to search the list of Online Banking accounts for your trading platform though – perhaps it is supported for automatic tracking too!

We've also integrated with TwelveData to further expand our stock prices coverage.

What if neither my institution, nor my symbol is available?

If you cannot find your investment institution on the Online Banking services list and Yahoo! Finance/TwelveData does not have a record for the stock exchange and symbols you’re interested in you can still add the investment account to MoneyWiz, filling out all of the details about the stock manually. However, because MoneyWiz cannot download the current share prices from the Internet, it will not be able to automatically update the value of your stock and generate the historical graph for you.

You can also place a request for your institution to be added to the Online Banking platform from here. Please note that while Salt Edge is our partner, they are a separate company so we have no knowledge or control over which banks are being added next so we cannot estimate when the integration with your institution might be completed.

Creating an investment account

You can add multiple investment accounts to your MoneyWiz database – you are not limited to just one. This allows you to track your brokerage account separately from your retirement account for example.

Using Online Banking

To add an Investment account for automatic tracking, start adding new account in MoneyWiz then choose Online Banking account type. Search the list for your trading institution to see if it’s available.

After you authenticate MoneyWiz will start downloading your current holdings. Once it finishes, you’ll be able to see all that data in MoneyWiz and have it contribute to your total Net Worth in the application.

For manual tracking

To add an account for manual tracking start adding new manual account, scroll to the bottom and find "Investment" type. Tap on it and start filling out the details:

  • Account name: a name for this account that will help you identify it on the list. For example "E*Trade" or "401k".

  • Cash Balance as of date: in the next field you need to enter your cash balance. Here you allocate the date to which your cash balance will be tied.

  • Cash Balance: enter your cash balance as of the date selected above (if you leave the date as today then enter your cash balance as of today). Tapping on the currency code would also allow you to choose a currency (we support investments in various currencies; if you don’t see your currency make sure it’s enabled in Settings -> Currencies).

If you switch to Extended section, you can edit other details of the account - just like described in account properties guide.

After you confirm those details, you’ll be asked to add your positions to the account. For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll populate a fictional portfolio. From the buttons at the bottom choose Add – a new screen will appear. You’ll be asked to enter some information about your security. Note that only the first three on top and Buy date are required – the rest is optional.

  • Symbol: the symbol of your security. As you begin to type, MoneyWiz automatically searches our partners' databases for the entered query and tries to pull the data for you. In order for MoneyWiz to be able to automatically refresh the stock price your symbol must be present in their database.

  • Holding type: the type of the security.

  • Buy date: enter the date of this buy operation (defaults to today).

  • Number of shares: the number of securities you’ve purchased. Note that it can be a negative number in case of borrowed shares or a fractional number if the Holding type is "Mutual Fund".

  • Price per share: will be downloaded from our partners if your symbol is recognized. You might to adjust it however as MoneyWiz presents you the current stock price: you are likely to have purchased it at a different price.

  • Total price: is calculated dynamically (Number of shares x Price per share).

  • Commission: here you can enter the commission you’ve paid when performing this buy operation.

  • Description: description of this operation. By default it pulls the name of the stock from the symbol.

After you add the details you want, your security is ready to be added to your portfolio. In our fictional portfolio, we’ve added several more stocks. Before you confirm account creation you can preview the securities you’ve added and their total value.

Once your investment account is created you can modify, change its position on the accounts list and delete just like any other account – see the other account guides for more information.

Working with Investment accounts

Now that our account is created we can see a beautiful chart of our portfolio!

Finding your way around the account

The Investment account has a different layout from most other accounts. It features 3 major areas:

  1. Info cards: showing you how your holdings are performing. You can scroll between them and manage them (re-order and disable) in the last card.

  2. Holdings view: displaying all of your holdings in one clear list, displaying basic information about them and their performance.

  3. Trades view: listing all trades and transactions for this account.

Creating new transactions and trades

Creating a new trade or transaction is as simple as adding a regular transaction. That's why you begin by simply clicking the + button at the bottom. You can choose from:

  • Buy - allows you to buy more stock. Note that Buy to open and Buy to close are all the same in MoneyWiz.

  • Sell - allows you to sell some stock. Note that Sell to open and Sell to close are all the same in MoneyWiz.

  • regular transaction types (expense, income, transfer, adjust balance) that are covered in Transaction basics tutorial.

To illustrate how you can add an operation to your portfolio, let’s purchase more stock to our fictional portfolio. To begin we click on the + button at the bottom and choose Buy. You’ll be presented with the view very much like the one we saw when adding stocks to our investment account when we were creating it. Once again you need to enter the symbol, number of shares and price per share. Other fields are optional. Adding a Sell operation works exactly the same way.

A couple of notes:

  • MoneyWiz supports entering holding aliases -- which is useful, if your Online Banking provider shares the holding under one symbol, but our partners list it under another. Read more here.

  • it is possible to have a negative holding value (e.g. -7 MSFT),

  • if at any time your holding reaches 0 value, it'll disappear from your Portfolio but the transactions will remain in Trades view. In order for the holding to reappear in Portfolio, its value needs to become different than zero,

  • you can hover your mouse or finger over the Investments chart to display holding values for a particular date,

  • you can use the buttons above the investment chart to quickly change the period the chart will cover or use the fields to the right to set the period more precisely to your liking,

  • you can refresh the exchange rates by clicking on the refresh rates button: in MoneyWiz for Desktop, next to the search bar and in MoneyWiz for iOS you can pull to refresh.

Did this answer your question?