What is an investment tracking app?
An investment tracking app allows you to keep an eye on all of your investments in one place. In some cases, these apps automatically import your investment transactions. In other cases, you have to manually input transactions.
Most investment tracking apps update your investments’ value based on current prices and the number of shares you own automatically. Some apps do not have this feature, though. Others may have delayed data that only updates once per day.
Why you should use an investment tracking app
Using an investment tracking app may give you the knowledge you need to manage your finances properly. If you have investment accounts at several brokerages, you need to look at your investments in a big picture way.
Using an investment tracking app that automatically updates your investments makes this much easier and less time-intensive. Some apps even give you insights into your overall costs, asset allocation, and other critical investing concepts that you can use to make better decisions about how to invest moving forward. Without this information, you may accidentally invest in a way that doesn’t help you meet your true investing goals.
For instance, you may not realize that mutual funds from two different brokerages actually hold similar investments and aren’t providing the diversification you were hoping for. In other cases, you may not realize you’re asset allocation is overweight in stocks, leaving you open to a larger than anticipated decline if markets drop in price rapidly.
Why you shouldn’t use an investment tracking app
Investment tracking apps aren’t perfect and many people have legitimate concerns with them. The most common concern is that the apps aren’t safe. Many require you to give login information to your investment accounts to set up automatic data feeds.
Giving away this information can seem like a bad idea for several reasons. First, data breaches are common in today’s world. The last thing you want to happen is having your investment account password leaking out. Next, you may be worried that giving these apps access to your accounts could result in fraudulent activity.
Investment tracking apps generally have very detailed security procedures in place to help address these risks. For instance, most apps have read-only access to your investment accounts, which means they can’t make transactions in your accounts.
Even with all of the security in place, don’t use investment tracking apps if you’re worried about these concerns. No app can be entirely secure, so there is always at least some level of risk.
What features should you look for in an investment tracking app?
Each person will want to look for different features in an investment tracking app. Some people may only want a big picture view of what their portfolio is worth every day. Others may want details about how their asset allocation breaks down based on all of their investments in mutual funds and ETFs.
After looking at these best investment tracking apps’ features, consider which are most important to you. Those are the features you should look for.
How to choose the best investment tracking app for you
Choosing the best investment tracking app for you comes down to a handful of factors. First, you must decide if you want a free app or a paid app. Then, you must determine which features are most important to you.
Based on those two decisions, compile a list of your investment tracking app options. Then, find the app that makes the most sense for you. Don’t forget to consider user reviews in the app store as they may share common issues that the app may have.
If you want to track your investments’ value, you have several options to choose from. Find out which option may best fit your needs from our detailed list.
Keeping track of your investments can be overwhelming. Chances are you may have a workplace retirement plan at your current job. People with long careers may have old workplace retirement plans at their past positions, too. When you add taxable investment accounts, IRAs, and investing app accounts, you may have your investments spread across several brokerage firms.
It’s hard to manage your investments when you have to check many locations to get updates on how your investments are doing. It also makes it more challenging to stick to your ideal asset allocation percentages.
Thankfully, several software solutions exist to help make tracking your finances more manageable. Some are apps you can download on your phone, while others are websites or software programs you download to your computer. Either way, investment tracking apps can help you keep a better eye on your investments, which may help you get better returns.
Here are a few of the best investment tracking apps I could find and what you need to know about each one.
What’s Ahead:
- Overview of the best investment tracking apps
- Personal Capital
- MoneyPatrol
- Morningstar
- Quicken Deluxe or higher
- SigFig
- Yahoo! Finance
- Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet
- Summary of the best investment tracking apps
- How I came up with this list
- What is an investment tracking app?
- Why you should use an investment tracking app
- Why you shouldn’t use an investment tracking app
- What features should you look for in an investment tracking app?
- How to choose the best investment tracking app for you
- Summary
Overview of the best investment tracking apps
| Investment tracking app | Best for |
|---|---|
| Personal Capital | Easy aggregation if you don’t mind sales calls |
| MoneyPatrol | Paid service with basic investment information and no ads |
| Morningstar | Aggregation without directly linking your accounts |
| Quicken | Established personal finance and investment tracker |
| SigFig | Those that want free portfolio analysis tools |
| Yahoo! Finance | People that already use Yahoo! Finance for information |
| Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets | People with spreadsheet skills that want to be in total control |
Personal Capital
- Cost – Free if you don’t use their investment management service.
- Best investment feature – Includes helpful investment checkup tool.
Personal Capital is a wealth management service that also offers investment tracking tools for free to everyone. You can link your account to Personal Capital’s dashboard and they’ll import your investment information into their dashboard automatically.
Investment tracking is helpful because it gives you a quick picture of your total investments in one place. If you simply want to check your net worth, you can do so quickly after logging into the dashboard.
Personal Capital has options to show you your portfolio’s performance over time compared to benchmarks, the makeup of your portfolio over time, based on your different accounts, and how your portfolio is allocated across all asset classes and sectors. It also has an investment checkup feature to show how your portfolio stacks up to their recommendations and a fee analyzer to help you see how much you’re paying to invest.
It’s important to point out that not all of your investments can be analyzed by Personal Capital. The asset class and sector breakouts may have certain investments they can’t classify, so you won’t always get a total picture.
The service is free though, so you can’t complain too much. Once you accumulate over $100,000 in investable assets, be prepared to deal with sales calls trying to get you to sign up for their paid wealth management services.
Learn more about Personal Capital or read our full review.
MoneyPatrol
- Cost – 15-day free trial followed by $59.99 per year automatic billing.
- Best investment feature – Includes investment tracking.
MoneyPatrol is an app that helps you monitor your finances by offering the following features:
- Creating budgets.
- A quick dashboard overview.
- Transaction history.
- Investment tracking.
- Spending trends.
- Merchant and category breakdown of transactions.
- Alerts and insights into your finances.
Like Personal Capital, you can link your accounts to MoneyPatrol’s app to allow automatic importing of information. This time-saving feature can make your life much easier.
Unfortunately, MoneyPatrol is sparse on the details of what their accounts offer. Usually, that means they don’t have many of the advanced features their competitors typically provide. Still, you should be able to track your investment holdings across all supported accounts with this app.
The benefit of using an app like MoneyPatrol is it is a paid service. If you’re having issues, you should be able to contact customer support to get an answer. You shouldn’t be bombarded with advertisements or partner offers that may not be in your best interests, either.
Learn more about MoneyPatrol or read our full review.
Morningstar
- Cost – Free for basic tracking / Paid premium option at $29.95 per month.
- Best investment feature – Get everything from news stories to investment tracking, even with the basic plan.
Morningstar offers both free and paid options for portfolio tracking on their website. The free portfolio tracking features are pretty basic, but they get the job done. To track your investments, you’ll need to input the ticker symbol, the number of shares, date purchased, purchase price, and commission paid based on the information you want out of the system.
Once you input your portfolio holdings, Morningstar will display your portfolio, including information such as:
- Current share price.
- Dollar change in price.
- Percentage change in price.
- Shares held.
- The market value of your holdings.
- % that holding is compared to your entire portfolio.
Morningstar also displays the fund ranking for mutual funds (one to five stars), but individual stocks’ rankings require you to sign up for the premium service. You can view the latest news on your holdings, your gain/loss for your holdings based on today’s price, and fundamental information about each holding, such as earnings per share, price to earnings forward ratio, and the stock’s industry or fund category.
Other Morningstar premium benefits include analyst reports, top investment picks, advanced screener options, and more. Premium costs $29.95 per month, $199 per year, $349 for two years, or $449 for three years based on which period you decide to pay for.
Quicken Deluxe or higher
- Cost – $46.79 per year or more.
- Best investment feature – Ability to link accounts and automatically download investment data.
Quicken used to be owned by Intuit. However, Quicken was spun off a few years ago. Unfortunately, that spin-off transitioned Quicken from software you pay for once, to software you have to pay for every year. That said, the software does allow you to track your investments.
Quicken’s Deluxe option offers basic investment and retirement account tracking within your Quicken personal finance software. This option doesn’t grant you access to premium features only available in higher service levels, though. If you want more investment features other than basic tracking, you have to pay for Premier, which costs $70.19 per year.
Premier includes Morningstar’s Portfolio X-Ray tool, the option to compare buy-and-hold options with improved portfolio analysis, and the ability to compare your returns to market averages. From a tax perspective, Quicken Premier can make your life easier. It allows you to track your cost basis in your positions and create Schedule D reports you’ll need to file your tax return each year.
SigFig
- Cost – Free portfolio tracker/paid investment management.
- Best investment feature – Connects automatically with over 80 brokerages.
SigFig is an investment management company that also offers a free portfolio tracker for everyone to use. Their tracker lets you view your entire investment portfolio in one place with a dashboard. It provides free weekly email summaries of your performance to help you monitor which investments are doing well and which aren’t.
SigFig doesn’t just display your portfolio information. They analyze it, too. They look for hidden fees, overexposure to particular stocks or investments, and look at how risky your portfolio is compared to the usual amount of risk you should be taking.
The portfolio tracker updates in real-time and also provides commentary from 500+ sources. If you’re looking for inspiration, you can compare your portfolio to market indexes or your peers. They even offer charts and tools that run common investment numbers for you rather than forcing you to calculate them yourself.
The portfolio analysis helps you identify if your portfolio matches your risk tolerance, what stock/bond mix is ideal for you, how diversified you are on a global basis, and whether you hold too much cash. While these are subjective, it’s nice to see an outside opinion to make sure you aren’t missing anything.
Yahoo! Finance
- Cost – Free/paid premium option available.
- Best investment feature – Ability to link accounts; paid product includes research and tools.
Yahoo! Finance has been one of the major sites people have used to keep up with investment news. They also offer a portfolio tracker that allows you to link accounts with certain brokers for automatic portfolio tracking. If your broker is omitted, you can still manually input your investments for monitoring.
The free version offers interactive charts to help you keep track of performance and unlimited portfolio inputs, watch list items, and lot creation for each investment lot you buy. If you want extra features, you can pay to upgrade to Yahoo! Finance premium.
Premium will cost you $34.99 per month or $349.99 per year and is a recurring subscription. The paid subscription helps more with active investors than someone just looking to watch their investments. It offers daily trade ideas, curated research, advanced portfolio tools and analytics, premium notifications and alerts, monthly education webinars, and more.
Learn more about Yahoo! Finance.
Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet
- Cost – Google Sheets – Free/ Microsoft Excel – You likely already own it.
- Best investment feature – Completely customizable based on what you want to build.
If you’re worried about sharing passwords, information, or the security of your investment accounts, Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets may be the answer you’re looking for. These spreadsheet software tools allow you to create virtually anything you want. There are plenty of pre-built templates you can download on the internet, too.
These options are more secure because you have to input the information about your holdings into these tools manually. You may be able to build import tools that strip information from your investment firm’s downloadable CSV (comma separated values) files, but that’s beyond the standard investor’s knowledge.
Excel offers tools to download and update data based on investment ticker symbols. If you input your current share number holdings and create a reliable spreadsheet, you should only have to update your holdings to see how your investments perform.
The manual process helps you appreciate the information more. You have to log in to each account and manually input each number, allowing you to think about your investments a bit more than a passive aggregation tool. It also makes you consider simplifying your investment life so you don’t have to log in to so many accounts each time you want to update your spreadsheet.
Learn more about Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
Summary of the best investment tracking apps
| Investment tracking app | Option to link accounts for automatic updates | Cost | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal Capital | Yes | Free unless you pay for investment management | Portfolio analysis tool and fee analysis tool |
| MoneyPatrol | Yes | $59.95 per year | 15-day free trial and investment tracking |
| Morningstar | No | Free unless you upgrade, then $29.95/mo | Manual investment input and mutual fund rankings |
| Quicken | Yes | $46.79 and up | Premier includes Morningstar X-Ray tool and tax schedule preparation |
| SigFig | Yes | Free unless you pay for investment management | Weekly email summaries, hidden fee analysis, risk analysis |
| Yahoo! Finance | Yes | Free unless you upgrade, then $34.99/mo | Interactive charts and watch list |
| Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets | No | Free, unless you have to purchase Microsoft Excel | Completely customizable based on what you want |
How I came up with this list
Coming up with a list of the best investment tracking apps isn’t an easy process. There are many factors I considered when coming up with our list.
Researched investment tracking apps
First, I researched which investment tracking apps are currently available on the market. While I couldn’t look over every single possible app, I found the most popular apps currently on the market to evaluate.
Looked at features offered and costs
For each investment tracking app that I considered, I looked at the features offered and the app’s costs, if there were any. I made a concerted effort to stick with more low-cost options.
I also made sure to select various investment tracking apps that may fit different users’ individual needs.
CONCLUSION
If you’re worried about stock market volatility, it’s hard to relax. But it’s not as difficult as it seems to follow your stocks, especially if you use investment tracking tools.
There are many tracking tools out there, but we wanted to see which ones were free. After some thorough research, we made a list of the best free investment tracking tools. In our list you will find both robo-advisors and more manual services.
There are many tracking tools out there, but we wanted to see which ones were free. After some thorough research, we made a list of the best free investment tracking tools. In our list you will find both robo-advisors and more manual services.