Keeping track of your investments can be overwhelming. 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 could have your investments spread across several brokerage firms.
But it’s hard to manage your investments when you have to check different locations, just 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 we’ve found and what you need to know about each one.
Overview of the best investment tracking apps
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.
Seeking Alpha
- Cost – Free for Basic, $29.99 a month for Pro ($239 if paid in full for one year).
- Best investment feature – A constant flow of fresh investing tips and ideas from 7,000+ trusted contributors.
Seeking Alpha calls itself “the world’s largest investing community” and backs up that claim by curating well-informed debates and discussions among its 20 million users — not unlike the Reddit of investing.
However, what separates Seeking Alpha from, say, r/WallStreetBets is that most of its primary content — 10,000 fresh articles and ideas a month — comes from a pool of over 7,000 trusted contributors. These are successful advisors, analysts, and traders who have a proven track record of sharing quality, research-based advice. Therefore, the comments sections tend to remain civil, focused, and cooperative.
In addition to a constant flow of fresh investing ideas, a Seeking Alpha Premium membership grants you access to their proprietary Quant Model — an algorithm which sniffs out bullish stock ideas like a prize truffle pig. It seems to be working just fine, too, as its “Strong Buy” suggestions have outperformed the S&P 500 every year since 2010.
In terms of tracking, once you build your portfolio, Seeking Alpha provides an impressive amount of alerts, analytics, newsletters, Wall Street Ratings, and plenty more to ensure you stay in the know, even with its free, most basic membership. Unfortunately, the platform’s generosity with tracking tools comes with a catch; even its paid Premium membership is an “ad lite” experience. Plus, you’ll need to pony up for at least the Premium membership to link your brokerage accounts.
But at least Seeking Alpha does connect to every major U.S. brokerage plus many international ones, and the process is safe and secure, thanks to SA’s partnership with Plaid.
Overall, if you’re looking for a more curated version of an investing subreddit — one that’s more TED than r/WSB — Seeking Alpha may be the platform for you.
Head to Seeking Alpha right now to score a Money Under 30-exclusive discount or learn more by reading 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.
Learn more about Morningstar.
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.
Learn more about Quicken.
Stock Rover
- Cost – Free for Basic, $7.99 a month for Essentials membership ($79.99 if paid in full for one year).
- Best investment feature – Sheer value. Pay just $8 a month for portfolio rebalancing, detailed analytics, and helpful alerts.
Sometimes the best apps and platforms aren’t made by billion-dollar companies, but rather just a couple of guys or gals who saw a market need.
Two such guys were Howard Reisman and Andrew Martin, who in 2008 had gotten tired of checking 17 different websites to see 41 different analytics about a particular stock. So they built Stock Rover — a canine-themed analytics aggregator that lets you “sniff out” several hundred performance metrics of a stock or ETF from a single dashboard.
In three words, Stock Rover is simple, cheap, and effective. Even its most basic, free membership will let you connect to your U.S.-based brokerage account, upload your portfolio, and set alerts for dips, unusually high trading volume, etc. Upgrade to an Essentials membership and you’ll unlock the ability to analyze over 7,000 stocks and ETFs for over 260 metrics, plus an overall viability assessment from Stock Rover’s proprietary screening algorithms.
Now, Stock Rover’s low price does come with a few shortcomings. The platform lacks the social/community features of many of its contemporaries, it doesn’t track forex or crypto, it doesn’t have a mobile app, and it’s only available for U.S. markets. That makes it much less appealing for day traders who probably seek a more fully-featured playground.
But for passive investors and long-term holders, Stock Rover is an excellent companion to have. Like its mascot, Stock Rover is always ready to play — but chill and low maintenance when you’re not around.
Learn more about Stock Rover.
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
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.
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.
