All Stacks Developer

I have been investing in the stock market for a while. I was looking for a software tool that could help me better manage my portfolio, but, could not find one that satisfied my needs. One day, I discovered that the Google Sheets application has a built-in function called GOOGLEFINANCE which fetches current or historical prices of stocks into spreadsheets. So I thought it is totally possible to build my own personal portfolio tracker with Google Sheets. I can register my transactions in a sheet and use the pivot table, built-in functions such as GOOGLEFINANCE, and Apps Script to automate the computation for daily evolutions of my portfolio as well as the current position for each stock in my portfolio. I then drew some sort of charts within the spreadsheet to have some visual ideas of my portfolio. However, I quickly found it inconvenient to have the charts overlapped the table and to switch back and forth among sheets in the spreadsheet. That's when I came to know the existen...

As investors, we always want to see our portfolio grows over time. If a portfolio made a 1000$ of gain in one year, is it good enough? Should we gauge the portfolio's performance against an alternative investment, for instance, a market index? Should we aim to beat that index? In this post, we will see how to compare a stock portfolio to market indexes by using Google Sheets, Apps Script, and Google Data Studio.

In the series of building personal stock portfolio tracker, we have learned how to use Google Sheets to register transactions . We have then used the pivot table and GOOGLEFINANCE function to compute the latest position of the stock portfolio . We have made a step further to use Apps Scripts to compute automatically and daily the stock portfolio's evolution . However, after all, we have several tables of data as the result which do not tell any story yet. We need to present those data in graphs to understand the portfolio's performance and make improvements accordingly. We can effectively plot graphs in different aspects directly in Google Sheets as it provides many charting tools. However, in my experience, having charts and data in the same spreadsheet is not very convenient because charts and tables tend to overlap each other and of lack of interactivity. We should have a dedicated dashboard to have an overview of the stock portfolio and we can do it greatly with Google Data...

When it comes to investment, it is not only important to know the up-to-date state of portfolio but also to track its evolution day by day. We need to know on a specific day, how much money has been invested in the portfolio, the current market value of owned shares, the available cash and the current profit. Visualizing those historical data points on a time-based graph helps us to identify which transactions were good and which were bad. This post shows how to compute automatically those historical data points by using data in Transactions sheet and the built-in GOOGLEFINANCE function of Google Sheets. A sample spreadsheet can be found in this post Demo stock portfolio tracker with Google Sheets . You can take a look at the sample spreadsheet to have an idea of how the data is organized and related. It is possible to make a copy of the spreadsheet to study it thoroughly.

As explained in the post Create personal stock portfolio tracker with Google Sheets and Google Data Studio , a personal stock portfolio tracker consists of 2 main elements: a spreadsheet in Google Sheets and an interactive dashboard in Google Data Studio. The dashboard below is built with Google Data Studio and visualizes data stored in the spreadsheet that can be found in the post Demo stock portfolio tracker with Google Sheets . The dashboard below is not an image, it is a real one and is interactive. You can change some filters to see data from a different perspective. For instance, you can change the date range or select a particular stock. NOTE: An enhanced version was published at Create personal stock portfolio tracker with Google Sheets and Google Data Studio .

As explained in the post Create personal stock portfolio tracker with Google Sheets and Google Data Studio , a personal stock portfolio tracker consists of 2 main elements: a spreadsheet in Google Sheets and an interactive dashboard in Google Data Studio. You can take a look at the sample spreadsheet below to have an idea of how the data is organized and related. It is possible to make a copy of the spreadsheet to study it thoroughly. NOTE: An enhanced version was published at Create personal stock portfolio tracker with Google Sheets and Google Data Studio .

The first task of building a stock portfolio tracker is to design a solution to register transactions. A transaction is an event when change happens to a stock portfolio, for instance, selling shares of a company, depositing money, or receiving dividends. Transactions are essential inputs to a stock portfolio tracker and it is important to keep track of transactions to make good decisions in investment. In this post, I will explain step by step how to keep track of stock transactions with Google Sheets.

When working with Google Apps Script, there are some tasks that I need to perform quite often. For that, I create a list of snippets that I can easily copy whenever needed. In this post, I share my useful snippets and my tips and tricks when working with apps script. If you have any snippet/tip/trick, you can share in the comment section.

As an investor, it is important to know the latest state of the stock portfolio. We need to know what stocks currently owned in the portfolio, how many shares for each one, how much dividend or gain contributed so far by each stock, etc. As we have registered stock transactions in a spreadsheet with Google Sheets, we can easily have the latest update from the stock portfolio by using pivot tables and GOOGLEFINANCE function.