Investing Portfolio Updates

How To Track Your Portfolio Performance Using Portseido

Calvin Lo

If you’ve been investing in the stock market on your own for some time now, do you know how you’re performing against S&P 500 or other benchmarks?

Besides measuring your portfolio performance by its compound annual growth rate or CAGR which is an absolute metric, you should also know where your portfolio performance stands relative to the benchmarks.

For a long time, I’ve had that question in my mind. Usually I track my portfolio on a Google Spreadsheet and on Yahoo Finance. Neither of these has a portfolio performance tracking tool.

Yahoo Finance recently added a little graph under ‘My Portfolio’ that compares each of your portfolios against the S&P 500 (^GSPC). However, it’s largely just a visual. There’s practically nothing you can interact with on the graph. I’m not even sure what the period of visualisation is. In addition, I can’t tell the actual percentage that my portfolio is lagging the benchmark here.

Source: Yahoo Finance

So far I’ve been living in the dark about how my portfolio as a whole is performing against benchmarks in detail, until I found Portseido.

If you’re interested to try it out, you can use my referral link.

Disclosure: I’ll earn a small commission when you sign up for a paid account. Thanks!

What Can Portseido Track For You?

Portseido allows you to track your portfolio performance, allocation (holdings), dividends, and analyse your trades.

Starting with the Home view, you are greeted by your portfolio value and a performance chart vs S&P 500 as the default benchmark. Here you immediately get an idea of how your portfolio is doing relative to the benchmark.

By the way, that figure is not my actual portfolio value, it defaults to an initial portfolio value of $10K if you choose to hide your actual portfolio value.

You can track portfolio performance in terms of value, return, and gain over different periods (1m, 3m, 6m, ytd, 1y, 3y 5y, all) in money-weighted return (MWR), time-weighted return (TWR), and simple return (SR).

For instance, one look at the return for my portfolio and you can tell that I’ve been lagging the S&P 500 quite substantially since the March 2020 pandemic-induced crash.

If you’re curious as to why I’m lagging the S&P 500 and what I’m adjustments I’m making to narrow the gap, do read my previous monthly portfolio updates:

If you scroll down, you can dig deeper into which holdings are your best and worst performers. My best performers in terms of Gain (Value) are Invesco Nasdaq 100 ETF (QQQ), Palantir (PLTR) and Vanguard Total World ETF (VT).

On the other hand, my worst performers were ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK), Sea Limited (SE) and Lion-OCBC Hang Seng TECH ETF (SGX:HST).

Further down, there’s a breakdown of your entire portfolio by individual holdings.

If you want to dig deeper into the nitty gritty of your portfolio performance, head over to the Performance tab.

Under Performance, Portseido tracks your portfolio performance against a wide range of benchmarks, e.g.

  • S&P 500, NASDAQ, Dow Jones, NYSE, Wilshire 5000 in the US
  • FTSE 100, CAC 40 in Europe
  • Nikkei 225, NIFTY 50, HSI, KLCI, STI in Asia
  • Thematic ETFs like ARK Innovation ETF, SPDR S&P 500 Growth ETF, Vanguard Growth ETF, Vanguard Value ETF
  • Even Bitcoin (though I’m skeptical of using it as a benchmark)

I chose the NASDAQ and STI indexes are secondary indexes for comparison too.

Seems like my portfolio’s Total Return vs Benchmarks has been underperforming both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq substantially, but only managed to edge out the STI slightly. Takeaway is that I have still have a lot to improve.

And one of my favourite features, the Historical Total Return. You can choose to view my monthly, quarterly or annually. From the annual view, our portfolio outperformed in 2023, but not enough to cover for the many years of underperformance prior. 2024 has not been great for the portfolio either.

Portseido also shows a nice chart of your individual holdings in a pie chart under Allocation. If you have multiple portfolios, you can view the allocation by individual portfolios or as a whole. Portseido also allows you to break down your allocation in greater detail by sector, industry, country, region, market, and asset type.

Here’s a short writeup of the various tabs in Portseido:

  • Performance – where you can find a detailed analysis of your portfolio performance
  • Allocation – where you can see a pie chart of your portfolio holdings
  • Trade Analysis – where you can see your buy and sell trades on a plot of your portfolio value over time
  • Dividends – where you can even see your dividends in detail, by tickers or by period
  • Goal Tracker – where you can set your investment goal
  • Transactions – where you can see every transaction detail, e.g. Buy, Sell, Dividend, Cash Deposit

Portseido is really rich with so much useful information for you to analyse and improve your trading and/or portfolio.

How Much Does Portseido Cost?

Portseido operates on the Freemium model, offering FREE usage up to 1 portfolio and 50 transactions. Thereafter, you need to upgrade to PLUS or PRO to handle more transactions and/or portfolios.

They also offer a 14-day trial so you can try it out without paying first.

If you’re interested to try it out, you can use my referral link.

Disclosure: I’ll earn a small commission when you sign up for a paid account. Thanks!

How To Use Portseido?

Portseido was set up to be really easy to use. Basically, the most tedious part is entering your trades the very first time when setting up. It gets easier thereafter because you only need to update your most recent trades. If you have been diligently recording it in another spreadsheet, it’s really easy though.

Here are the 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Sign up for a free account. You can sign in with email address or Google account.

Step 2: Input your trades, either via Google Spreadsheet, manual input, or export your trades from your brokerage. I personally used the Google Spreadsheet method since I already have all my trades recorded there. Portseido provides you a Google Sheet template you can make a copy of and either enter your trades manually or copy+paste from your records. Only a few essential fields are required: Date, Ticker, Action, Shares, Price, Commission.

Step 3: Follow the instructions through to provide your Spreadsheet URL so that Portseido can pull the data from it. That’s it, you’re done. Portseido has all the info required to provide you detailed analysis and beautiful visualisations. There may be some errors thrown out by Portseido, but they also provide you guidance on how to resolve them.

Conclusion

Beyond the set up and admiring the pretty charts, the most important thing in tracking your portfolio is to gain insight into your portfolio and use those learnings to improve your portfolio performance. Otherwise, going through all this trouble to set up this tracking in Portseido will just be a waste of time.

What one learns from their portfolio will vary from person to person. Personally, it was a wake up call for me when I realised how much I lagged the benchmark S&P 500. After I first started to use Portseido to track and analyse my portfolio performance, I realised my underperformance was because of my Singapore stocks so I started getting rid of them.

Only time will tell if the actions you take based on the insights revealed through Portseido had a positive or negative impact on your returns. However, what’s valuable from this exercise are the actionable insights you gain from a better understanding of your portfolio.

Hope this post on Portseido is useful for you, especially if you’re looking for a portfolio tracking tool.

If you’re interested to try it out, you can use my referral link.

Disclosure: I’ll earn a small commission when you sign up for a paid account. Thanks!

If you do end up trying Portseido, let me know what you think about the tool, what you learnt about your portfolio, or even what actionable insight you’ve gained from it if any.

Thanks for reading!

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I am not professional financial advisor nor do I work in the finance industry. Anything I write here is purely my personal opinion. Please do your own research and due diligence before investing into anything. All investments come with associated risks. Best to consult a financial advisor if you’re still unsure.

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Disclaimer: This is not financial advice. I am not professional financial advisor nor do I work in the finance industry. Anything I write here is purely my personal opinion. Please do your own research and due diligence before investing into anything. All investments come with associated risks. Best to consult a financial advisor if you’re still unsure.

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Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links and I may get a commission when you click on the links or open an account through the links, at no additional cost to you. I only recommend products or services that I have personally tried and have found useful.