Chapter 12: Managing and Tracking Your Investments

Microsoft Money 2006 includes some fantastic investment tools for everyone, from the beginning investor to the active day trader. You can use Money to track, manage, and closely monitor your investments. Regardless of whether you invest with one brokerage firm or many, Microsoft Money puts all of your investments in one place for easy reference: the Portfolio Manager.

Portfolio Manager

The Portfolio Manager gives you a comprehensive view of all of your investment accounts. In the Portfolio Manager, you can:

• Record and view your most recent buy, sell, and other transactions.
• Update investment prices.
• View price history, basic analysis data, and details such as ticker symbols, cost basis, and tax status.
• Analyze price, performance, and other data in reports.
• Customize your portfolio view, choosing from 75 columns of financial data.
• Record mergers, spin-offs, transfers, and splits.

To access the Portfolio Manager:

1. Click Investing.
2. Click Investing Tools, and then click Portfolio Manager.

By default, transactions are grouped by the accounts in which they are held. To view the transactions for an investment, click the plus sign (+) to the left of an item; it will expand to show the purchases, sales, and other activities for that investment. As shown in Figure 12-1, the Portfolio Manager maintains a wealth of information on each investment, and includes an investment performance summary that gives you the details of your most active investments.

Figure 12-1: Portfolio Manager

With Portfolio Manager, you can quickly update your stock prices automatically or manually. While connected to the Internet, Money will download price and stock data from MSN Money for publicly-traded companies when you select Update prices now from the Update prices menu in the left pane. For private firms or stocks for which data cannot be automatically downloaded, select Update prices manually from the Update prices menu in the left pane. Money will display a list of your stocks and ask you to enter the price and the date on which the investment hit that price.

Edit an account in Portfolio Manager

You can update contacts, online services, and cash portion information for any account in Portfolio Manager.

1. Click Investing.
2. Click Investing Tools, and then click Portfolio Manager.
3. Double-click the investment account you want to edit.
4. After you make your changes, click Done.

At-a-glance portfolio performance Figure 12-2: Portfolio performance banner As you work, you can check the overall performance of your investments at the bottom of the Portfolio Manager, as shown in Figure 12-2. A single line shows you the change in value for the day, the market value of your entire portfolio, and your year-to-date return on investment. Continue >>

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