Creating New Portfolio

Before going onto the additional charting in the Equity Charts tab, first let’s take the time to learn how to setup a new account. If you read over the Menu section of the guide, you know the first step is to go to the File menu. From there, click on the New Account menu item. Doing so will bring up the following dialog after asking if you want to save the current open account:

As seen in the example portfolio, the “From” date was fixed and could not be changed. That value comes from the Initial Date you specify in this dialog. It should be the first date in which you want to start trading the new account.

The Initial Deposit is the value of your account with your broker. In this example, the new account we are creating is for January of 2007 with an initial account value of $5000. After click OK, let’s look at the excel grid created:

As you can see, the Account Value starts out with $5000 as does the initial “ + / - “ deposit of $5000. You will probably also notice that the month starts December of 2006 instead of the specified January of 2007. The reason for this is because PortfolioTK uses month ending account balances to calculate statistics. So by entering the $5000 into the month ending Account Value of December, it will make it so January starts with the $5000 Account Value. If you had a gain in January of $500, you would enter $5500 ($5000 initial deposit + $500 gain) in January. Then the proper 10% gain would be realized and charts updated accordingly. Ordinarily, you would enter the deposits and withdrawals the same month as they occurred. The exception is only for new accounts and it is done automatically by PortfolioTK.