Tracking Portfolio

There are a lot of investment sites that provide portfolio trackers along with their primary product. Most platforms implement this feature to improve ease of access for the user. Though easy to implement, they cannot provide a lot of flexibility as desired by the user. This creates a problem for certain groups who participate in auctions, trade frequently or simply desire more flexible data visualization. There are many paid websites that provide flexible features or integrations with brokers but they tend to be paid; and why put in small amount of initial profits just for better portfolio management or analysis.

I found a pretty simple solution to this petite problem - Google Sheets. Without any coding required, I built my own portfolio tracker which I can customize according to my needs. The toughest part, fetching latest stock data was easily solved by a G-Sheets function GOOGLEFINANCE. It provided me with all the symbol data I needed for all majorly known and almost all small companies.

Feel free to copy and try out the template of the portfolio tracker I use.

My G-Sheets portfolio tracker

Though a lot of portfolio trackers are out there, a customized portfolio tracker with Google Sheets will help in better logging, analysis and visualization of your portfolio.

Learning how to trade

Firstly, never take paid courses; because the goals is to earn money from trading/investing, and spending money upfront for it doesn't sound too enticing.

Secondly, there are way too many tutorials by the self-called "market gurus", free or otherwise, to choose from. And most of them, if you have not figured are trying to get some kind of recognition or monetization with their courses. Even free YouTube videos felt like a waste of time to me because most of those videos are too ambiguous and end up teaching basics that I already knew. That being said, there are a few tutorials out there who genuinely aim to teach trading/investment without hoping much in return. One such playlist, that I personally watched and learnt from is Learn2Trade by Vivek Bajaj. The playlist starts of with explaining basic of trading and moves all the way to strategies for equity, options, currencies, commodities etc. For investors, I would suggest another playlist of the same channel - Learn2Invest by Vivek Bajaj.

PS: The playlists are not sponsored by the channel, its just that I personally liked and found them really useful. There maybe other similar altruistic playlists/courses out there. I shared this specific playlist for ease of access and saving you some time from searching playlists/courses.

Never go for paid courses. You will find a lot of altruistic courses/playlists..

Moving up: Creating your own strategies and fund allocations for investing

When I started trading I constantly heard that when it comes to strategies for investment, to each his own. I always found it perplexing and was of a mindset that there must be one strategy out there creates high returns at low risk provides with lot of entry opportunities - The Idea Strategy; which, in reality, doesn't exist. The reason for this is because each investor has different risk appetite, and is able to give varying time for the task.

At first, you just need to start with a basic and simple strategy in which you believe most in. Keep following it for a month or two. Meanwhile, keep looking into others' strategies. If you like any one of their strategies try amalgamating them into yours. Alternatively you could also allot a small portion of your capital (say 10-15%) to that strategy and see if it works out for you. If you feel it works better, than you can allocate more portion of your capital.

"Creating new strategies" doesn't always mean that you have to research and make one from the scratch. You can find multiple strategies, combine the best of all worlds and then you have your own new strategy. I will admit it is a bit time-taking task but the end result is worth.

Let me give you my example. I allot 10-15% of my capital for one company. This means, at a time, I am able to invest in about 7 -10 companies at a time. This is a sweet spot for me when it comes to fund allocation. Allocating more capital to a company would mean less diversification and higher risk. Meanwhile less capital allocation to a single company would have my attention spread out. Lesser fund allocation for each company would also mean that I would constantly have to keep finding new companies to invest as each investment runs its course (either reaches target or hits stop-loss). When I started out, the initial 7-10 companies I invested in, were from the same strategy (which was delivery based at that time). Slowly as I surfed through other strategies, I found a few interesting ones, and mixed 2 similar ones to create a new one which I thought could work for me. I found companies that triggered this strategy and added them to a watch-list. I invested the money from one of the upcoming investment exit into the most promising company from the watch-list. If the results were good, I invested more from the upcoming exits. At the end it comes down to how much weight are you able to give to each strategy in your quiver

Select a readily-available strategy at first. Keep looking out for strategies others are using. When you find some good ones, try tweaking or merging them a bit to create a new one and allocate funds to the new strategy as confortable, thereby either increasing the allocation, decreasing it or keeping it constant.

Recommendations and Tips - Boon or bane?

Spoiler alert - The answer to this question is diplomatic. The investing world is full of people trying to recommend certain stocks. It could be recommendations from SEBI registered brokers or tips from shady investors/groups who might be invested in a stock and want it to move up. Should you follow them? Short answer - do your research on each tip/recommendation. These recommendations are really helpful for adding scripts to your radar and saving you hours of scrolling and tedious research.

Personally, I prefer getting recommendations from trusted sources and then doing my research upon them. If they fit into one of my strategies, provide sufficient risk-reward ratios etc. I add them to my watch-list. "Trusted sources" can range anywhere from healthy forum discussions (if some reason is also mentioned behind recommending the script) to broker researches. There are certain forums you can smell from far away where retail investors try to pitch bad scripts usually because they are invested in them at a loss and are trying to promote it so that the price can be lifted.

A big no for me is joining groups (WhatsApp or Telegram), paid or otherwise. Such groups turns you into a sheep following a certain trader blindly. Additionally do keep in mind that if you are invested in a script, never seek recommendations from public forums for making your next move. There will be people favoring both side(bullish and bearish) but you will form and emotional bias towards the one favoring you. Such recommendations are highly destructive to your capital.

Recommendations can save your time by putting companies on your radar but be a emotionless entity, do your research and decide for yourself whether to consider the script

Disclaimer: At the end I do need to mention that I am not a SEBI registered or authorized person. This blog is just to share my personal experiences