What to use instead of StockMarketEye

The product

StockMarketEye was a portfolio tracker you installed. Its download page, captured by the Internet Archive in July 2023, offered builds for Windows 7 and later, macOS 10.10 and later on Intel and Apple Silicon, and 64-bit Linux, licensed for up to eight devices, with a free companion app for iOS and Android that synced with the desktop install and did not work without it. After a 14-day trial it cost 74.99 dollars a year.

Its home page listed what that bought: unlimited portfolios, watchlists across stocks, ETFs, mutual funds and currencies, brokerage-account import, dividend and cost-basis tracking, multi-currency support, charts, stock alerts on the desktop and the phone, and performance reports exported to PDF or CSV. It sold itself as the thing that replaces the spreadsheet, and for a long-term investor who wanted a program rather than a website, it was one of a small number of choices.

What happened. The dates come from StockMarketEye's own site.

• 5 September 2023. A release note headed "StockMarketEye Update – September 2023" said the owners, who had bought the software some time before, had run into stabilisation costs, a troubled move from Yahoo's price data to Twelve Data and rising expenses, and that "StockMarketEye will cease its operations on September 26, 2023". It added that from 27 September "accessing or exporting your data will NOT be possible".
• 26 September 2023. The last day of service. By 29 September 2023 the domain carried a goodbye page, "StockMarketEye has ceased operations on September 26, 2023.", and by 25 October its home page redirected there.

Three weeks of notice, no named successor, and no word in the notice about refunds for the rest of a paid year. The year the original developer started it and the date of the sale are reported elsewhere; the notice gives neither.

What to use instead

StockMarketEye did four jobs in one program: tracking a portfolio, running on your own computer, putting it on your phone, and watching prices you did not own. Nothing in this catalogue does all four, so split them.

A desktop app that keeps the data with you. Wealthfolio is the nearest shape: a desktop app, iOS and Android builds and a self-hosted option, with the portfolio in a SQLite file on your machine. The app is free; Connect, at 29 dollars a year, syncs it across devices, and higher Connect plans add broker connections through SnapTrade. Portfolio Performance is the older and plainer one: free, Windows, macOS and Linux, one file on your disk, and a read-only phone app. Its strength is reading broker PDF statements, and its importer list leans heavily towards German-speaking banks, so a US investor will write more CSV than they import.

Reports without installing anything. Sharesight is hosted, not desktop, but it covers the reporting side properly: multi-currency holdings, dividends and money-weighted returns across brokers, with a few direct broker connections, email parsing for trade confirmations, and a file importer that reads a CSV, a PDF or a screenshot in whatever layout you have. The free plan stops at 10 holdings.

Self-hosted. If what you liked was owning the install rather than having a desktop window, Ghostfolio runs on your own server or Docker host and is open source, with a hosted plan at 48 dollars a year. It has no broker connections at any tier; trades go in by hand, by CSV or JSON, or through its import endpoint.

Watchlists and alerts. This is the piece the trackers drop. Wealthfolio's own card lists no price alerts and no screening, and Portfolio Performance has no alerts either. Stock Analysis Pro, at 79 dollars a year, carries watchlists and 100 alerts beside its financials and screener. It is a research site first, though a free account adds watchlists and a portfolio that brokerage accounts can sync into.

What you give up

One program for the whole job. StockMarketEye put the portfolio, the watchlists, the charts and the alerts behind one licence. The local-first trackers above stop at tracking what you own, so keeping an eye on what you do not own becomes a second account somewhere else.

A phone that talks to the desktop for a single price. The companion app came with the 74.99 dollar licence. Wealthfolio charges 29 dollars a year for sync between devices, and Portfolio Performance's phone app is read-only, with its dashboards behind a subscription of 3 euros a month.

A vendor answering the mail. The two desktop picks are open-source projects, each built around one lead developer. They cannot close the way StockMarketEye did, because the file and the last release stay on your disk, but nobody is under contract to fix a price feed when it breaks. Portfolio Performance's own manual warns that the free price feeds' terms have become more restrictive over time.

Migration notes

Rebuild from your broker, not from StockMarketEye. If you exported a CSV before 27 September 2023, it was StockMarketEye's report, not a transaction ledger every other tracker can read. The safer source is the broker: download the full trade history and import that, then use the old export to check the totals.

Check cost basis once, deliberately. Each tracker computes it its own way. Wealthfolio uses FIFO only, Portfolio Performance offers FIFO or moving average, and Sharesight's tax reports follow the rules of Australia, New Zealand and Canada. A realised gain that differs from StockMarketEye's figure is usually a method difference, not an import error.

Prices come from somebody's feed, again. StockMarketEye's notice named Yahoo's "ever-changing API policies" among its troubles. Wealthfolio uses Yahoo by default and Portfolio Performance lists it among its feeds; both let you choose another provider, Portfolio Performance per security, which is worth setting up before a feed fails rather than after.