Hi Patrick, I appreciate your hard work and devotion to this forum and I would like to take you up on your offer to develop a portfolio manager. I tried to develop a simple portfolio manager in EXCEL awhile ago, but gave up in frustration. By "simple", I mean the program should contain, at a minimum, the following data fields: Open position Date, Close position Date, Symbol, Position (Long or Short), open fill price, close fill price, shares, amount gain or loss, % gain or loss. It would be nice to be able to track closed performance by week, month, and year. Another "bonus field" would be the ability to link a text file for comments and a chart at the opening of the trade and the closing of the trade, maybe via an HTML save in metastock? The program doesn't have to be dynamic as far as tracking open positions, I use Medved QuoteTracker for that (excellent product, by the way). I just need more of a trade log that keeps track of closed trades and allows the ability to provide historical feedback of my trading results over time. I have yet to find anything prepackaged that can do that. Most everything out there is way over complicated! Thanks for your efforts, and let me know if you need more info or would like other suggestions. -Alex

Hello Patrick ! I am not sure to understand what you mean with "portfolio manager program". Do you want to create a program that follows your open trades and informs you about your performance, or something more sophisticated that helps you to follow the performance of a portfolio against a benchmark ? In the first case, I would like to see something about the number of winning and loosing trades in a row, the average gain and loss, etc. -> basically, the items included in Metastock reports. You could maybe try to include also the Value At Risk, but this would suppose to test first the normality of the returns of the portfolio. In the second case, it is much more complicated because a portfolio manager usually monitors its portfolio in terms of beta, standard deviation and tracking error against its benchmark in order to get some idea about the risk adjusted return. The trouble is then to build and update the correlation matrice between stocks (assuming you are only interested in stocks) to be able to get the quantitative risk measures. If this is the way you want to go, I can provide you with some screenshots of existing softwares. Didier By the way, as I just returned, I was not able to start building my trading system with the piece of code you nicely wrote for me, but I won't forget to keep you in touch.

Hi Patrick, [quote=portfolio tracker" with an integrated "trade log". [quote=risk" field. Add to that a "Reward" projection price and you could calculate a simple Risk/Reward ratio for the trade. Well, if you do start this project remember the "K I S S" principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid! :) -Alex

Hi ! Patrick, if you want to keep it simple : forget what I wrote ! At least, what I described under the second case. But for your culture, you will find attached something about the Value At Risk and the screenshots from one quantitative tool from Citigroup. The heart of the system lies on a risk model and a huge database.

Screenshot 2

What's the status, P? Did you ditch this project or are you looking for a VC to get you started? LOL! :D

VC- venture capitalist Yea, you have to do it for yourself, not for Equis. Just make it compatible with Equis products and program it on Equis time... :smt045

A few suggestions for the portfolio manager - handle all kind of securities, options, bonds, etc - real time price update - equity graph - Gain/loss over a specific period - keep track of old (closed) investments, dividends (cash and stock), cash, interest, splits, etc - grouping by market, sort of security, industry - showing positions in a graph when this graph is opened in MS - Have several portefolios and be able to group these - keep track of tranaction and bank cost - set limits and alarms on specific movements or prices of securities in the portfolio just a few to start with.. Best regards,