Stock Portfolio Trackers

Two facts eliminate more of this listing than any preference you have, and both come before price: whether the tracker can import from your broker, and whether it computes a capital gain your revenue authority recognises. Automatic broker connections are broadest in the US and Canada, thinner in the UK and Australia, and in continental Europe usually limited to a handful of large neo-brokers. Check your own broker by name first. No plan tier fixes a missing connection.

• Australian capital gains, parcel by parcel, laid out for the ATO's myTax return — Navexa, A$240 a year.
• US wash sales and Form 8949 rebuilt from raw broker history — TradeLog, $219 a year, on Windows.
• Money-weighted tracking with a tax report for Australia, New Zealand or Canada — Sharesight; UK and US investors get average-cost reports only.
• Free, open source, your own server — Ghostfolio or Wealthfolio if you want it local-only, or Portfolio Performance, a free desktop app that reads your bank's PDF statements, with a €3-a-month premium on the mobile companion only.
• German neo-brokers and direct banks, imported by statement or Autosync — Parqet, free for one portfolio, €11.99 a month for Plus.
• Stocks, ETFs and crypto spread across several brokers and currencies — Portseido, free up to 100 transactions, $10 a month after that.
• Dividend income, a payment calendar or payout research — a different product; see dividend trackers.
• Everything you own, property and cash included — Kubera.
• Canadian registered accounts, with TFSA, RRSP, FHSA and RESP room and ACB from broker CSVs — Looniee, free for 10 holdings, CA$9 a month for Plus; no broker sync.
• A free mobile tracker for a handful of positions — Delta or getquin.

What actually decides the choice

Feature lists in this category are nearly identical, and nearly irrelevant. What separates these products is geography, arithmetic and where your credentials sit.

Broker import coverage. The single most expensive thing about a tracker is typing into it. Automatic connections are widest in the US and Canada, where a handful of aggregation APIs cover the large brokers; they are patchier in the UK and Australia, and in continental Europe they generally reach a short list of neo-brokers and stop. Everything outside that list is a CSV upload — where the format changes when the broker redesigns its statement — or hand entry. Check your own broker by name on the vendor's supported list before you check anything else. No plan tier fixes a missing connection. In Germany the working answer is often the statement rather than a live link: Parqet's Autosync reaches five German banks and logs in afresh every time, and Portfolio Performance reads PDF statements from more than 90 banks and brokers, weighted heavily to Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The tax jurisdiction it was built for. A capital gains calculation is not a localisation setting; it is a different algorithm per country. The UK pools identical shares into a Section 104 holding and overrides it with same-day and 30-day matching rules. Australia discounts a gain by 50% once the parcel is a year old, and carries franking credits alongside. Canada wants adjusted cost base and disallows a superficial loss inside 30 days. Germany taxes an accumulating fund before you sell it, through the Vorabpauschale, and no product here models German tax: Parqet, the German tracker, has a tax dashboard that adds up the tax already recorded on your sales, dividends and withholding and computes nothing to file. A tracker computing one of these correctly is not one release away from the others, which is why the products here that do tax seriously name one to three countries and offer everyone else a generic gains summary — Sharesight Australia, New Zealand and Canada, Navexa Australia, TradeLog the US.

Which return number it reports. See below. This is the field most likely to make you believe something untrue about your own portfolio.

How the free tier is capped. In this category the cap is holdings, not days or features — often around ten positions, sometimes one portfolio, and on Portseido 100 transactions ever, which a few years of history can use up in the first import. That is a real product for an index investor and useless to anyone with a long tail of individual names. Paid tiers for one person run from about $7 a month — Delta PRO at $6.99, Sharesight Starter billed annually — to about $30, where Sharesight Premium is $31 month to month and Parqet Investor €29.99. Several are sold by the year only: getquin from €89.99, Navexa from A$240 for new customers, TradeLog from $219. The net-worth product sits above that: Kubera is $250 a year, annual-only, because it prices against the size of the balance sheet rather than the number of tickers.

Whether it holds your credentials. A cloud tracker with broker linking holds a connection to your accounts through a third-party aggregator. Open-source trackers — self-hosted on your own server, or local-first on your own machine — do not, and pay for it with manual imports and no automatic corporate actions. This is a genuine trade, not a purity argument.

What it does with corporate actions and currency. Splits, spin-offs, mergers, return-of-capital distributions and ETF reinvestments are where a cost basis quietly goes wrong, and where a cheap tracker is cheap. If you hold assets in more than one currency, ask separately whether the tracker reports currency gain as its own line — a portfolio up in dollars can be flat in euros, and one number hides that. Portseido is built for the case of holdings scattered across brokers and countries: each portfolio has a base currency with FX gain and loss tracked automatically, cash can be held in several currencies, and returns are benchmarked in your own base currency. Navexa splits every return into capital gain, income and currency movement that sum to the total.

TWR, MWR, XIRR: three labels, sometimes three answers

Vendors are inconsistent here in a way that matters, because these are different quantities and they are all called "return".

Time-weighted return (TWR) removes the effect of your deposits and withdrawals. It measures the holdings, not your behaviour, and it is what fund managers are judged on. German-influenced products call it TTWROR — "true time-weighted rate of return" — which is the same idea computed off a valuation at each cash flow. Portfolio Performance, the open-source desktop tracker, computes it alongside IRR for free; Parqet and getquin use the same label.

Money-weighted return (MWR) weights the return by how much money was actually invested and when. It measures you, including whether you happened to buy in March 2020.

XIRR is not a third concept. It is the money-weighted return computed from dated cash flows; IRR assumes even periods, XIRR uses the actual dates. A tracker showing "IRR", "XIRR", "money-weighted" or "dollar-weighted" is showing the same family of number.

"Simple return" and "annualised return" are neither, and are defined per vendor. Some annualise by weighting each dollar of capital by how long it has been invested; others divide by elapsed years. Read the help page before you compare two products' headline percentages — the disagreement is usually definitional, not a bug.

The practical rule: if you are asking "is this strategy any good", you want time-weighted. If you are asking "what did I actually earn", you want money-weighted. A tracker that offers only one is not wrong; it has picked a question, and you should know which. Sharesight has picked: its return is money-weighted, by a variation of Modified Dietz, with no time-weighted option anywhere, so its headline figure cannot be set against a fund's.

Three jobs hiding behind one interface

Tracking is the base job: consolidate several brokers into one position, price it daily, and show allocation and performance. Judge these on import coverage and on corporate-action handling. A forward dividend calendar and projected income are a different product wearing the same UI, and have their own section: dividend trackers.

Tax is the job with the highest cost to the vendor and the highest switching cost to you. It requires jurisdiction-specific gains logic, a full transaction history you may have to backfill by hand, and an output format an accountant or a filing portal accepts. Trackers that do this well charge for it and restrict it to named countries. Two products here are bought for this job alone. Navexa matches every sale to the parcels it came from, applies the 50% discount parcel by parcel and totals the year against the field codes of the ATO's myTax return — on its Australian-dollar plans only; the US-dollar plans carry no tax reports at all. TradeLog rebuilds a US trader's year from raw broker history rather than the 1099-B, adjusts wash sales across accounts and against IRAs, and prints Form 8949 detail — US federal rules only, Windows only, and nothing unlocks until a full year per account is imported and reconciled by hand against each broker's 1099-B. Neither is a filing tool anywhere else, and Sharesight, the tracker with the widest tax list here, covers three countries.

Net worth is not a portfolio job at all. It counts property, private holdings, pensions, vehicles, cash and debt, and its output is one number over time, not a per-position return. The products built for it are priced for people with an estate to watch rather than a watchlist, and they are usually weak precisely where the other two jobs are strong.

Nothing useful comes from ranking a tax report against a net-worth dashboard. Decide which of the three you are buying, then compare only inside it — and check your broker and your country first, because those two facts eliminate more of the listing below than any preference you have.

Where this category connects

The automatic broker connections these products depend on are not usually their own: almost every tracker here buys them from one of the vendors in brokerage account aggregation APIs, which is why two trackers support such different broker lists and why the fix for a missing one is rarely a support ticket. If what you want is an analysis of how you traded rather than what you hold, that is a different product — see trading journals.