stocks posts

Looks like it’s been a good while since I’ve posted on this blog. My “professional” blog, which gets much more traffic, has been getting my focus, and I’m still not sure what will be happening with this blog.

Anyway, on with the post.  I use Google Finance for my everyday checks on my stock portfolio and the market in general.  I check for prices and news.  It gives me a basic idea of my returns for each stock and for my overall portfolio, though it doesn’t seem to match perfectly with my tracking in Quicken.

A while back they began tracking dividend payouts.  They are not entirely accurate, which is probably why the numbers are off.  They also are not applied to the returns of individual stocks, only the whole portfolio.  Since Quicken can show me per-stock returns with dividends, this provides a nice comparison between market returns and overall returns.

So just today I looked at my portfolio after having not payed attention to it for several days or so, and suddenly my returns were way up (from around 60% overall to 80%).  I was somewhat excited for a second, but confused because the overall market had not jumped that much, and as I looked through prices, none seemed that different from where they were.