A few months ago Google made the unfortunate decision to end their Google Finance portfolio tracker. This was the main way I checked my stocks and the first website I visited every weekday after the markets open at 9:30. They replaced with… something. It’s terrible. Now I can only view 6 of my stocks at a time and only very limited information about them.

Goodbye Google Finance.

Now, I needed to find a replacement portfolio tracker. I reached out to the masses on Twitter. One person suggested using Google Spreadsheets. I love spreadsheets. (Yes, I’m weird. I know.) However, the value of a portfolio tracker is that you get updated data. It’s not helpful if I have to manually put in the price of Vanguard’s Total Market Index (VTI) each day. After a little research, it seems that Google Spreadsheets supports all kinds of (mostly) real time stock data. Yes, the quotes may be delayed 20 minutes, but for my purposes, that isn’t that big of deal.

I decided to “nerd out” and create my own portfolio tracker. Better yet, I can share it with you! Go to this link and select the File –> Make a Copy. Then edit it to suit yourself. You should only have to put your own stock tickers and cost basis in there. You also might want to look up the price of the stock from Jan 1, 2016 if you want to make use of the 2016 YTD column. Unfortunately, I had some difficulty getting Google to import historical price quotes automatically.

I’ve found this tool really helpful. I’ve consolidated information from three brokerage accounts so now I can see everything at once.

However, it’s not perfect. It’s got three disadvantages from what I had before with Google Finance.

1. No stock charts – It was always great to click in and use Google’s great financial charts. Now, I have to go elsewhere for that information.
2. No stock news – Whenever a stock moved 5% or more, I could fairly easily look at the news and see if they released earnings or an analyst gave them an upgrade. Now, I have to do separate research in another browser tab.
3. It is slow – Doing all the calculations really drags down my computer. Of course, the 50 browser tabs that I already have open don’t help. And having only 4GB of memory isn’t making things better. Your experience may be better than mine. Even though it is slow, I can get most of the information very quickly and move on. It’s not something that I leave running for a long time.

The lack of stock news is kind of a killer. I’ve started using Marketwatch, and it’s okay, but not great. What do you use to track your stock portfolio and where do you get your stock news? Let me know in the comments.