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PortTrak - Charting PortTrak saves data about your portfolio daily in order to allow you to chart your performance against four of the most important indexes known. You can chart against the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), the Standard & Poor's 500 (S&P), the Nasdaq Composite Average (Nasdaq), and The Foolish Portfolio (Fool). PortTrak daily computes how well your portfolio is doing, as well as how much new cash you put into it. That way, when it graphs your performance against the Indexes, it lays out how you would have done had you simply invested in one of them, rather than investing the way you did. You will not be able to use the charting functions the first day that you open PortTrak, since there is no portfolio data to work from. From the second day on, however, you will be able to see how you are doing relative to the market and the Fool. Your first step to charting (after PortTrak has been running for at least 2 market days) is to point your browser to www.fool.com and go to the Technical Support Area. Located there, in the Foolish Technical Support Library will be a file which will be called "PortTrak Charting: Index Update". This file contains the daily updates for each of the four Indexes you'll be charting against. The file is updated regularly, though not daily, and if you read the file description, you'll see what period is covered by the update. You may update as often or as seldom as you'd like, since the files will stay in this library. Download this update. You'll need it when you get back to PortTrak. Now that you are back in PortTrak and have the file you saved from the Fool containing the Index Updates safely on your hard drive, it's time to bring them into PortTrak. Under the Charting menu, choose Update Indexes. PortTrak will prompt you to locate this file so that it can bring in the numbers. You will then be asked for the dates that you wish to update. You may choose to update only the dates since last you performed an update, or you may do all of the dates available. Since it is a relatively quick process, it doesn't hurt to do more dates back than you think you need. Once you OK the dates, PortTrak will bring in all of the relevant information automatically. PortTrak will offer you dates that are after the date the indexes were last updated if your portfolio has later dates. If you choose to update them, they will contain the same numbers as the last date updated. For example, if January 8 the DJIA closes at 6549.48 and that was when the last index file was put up, but you pull the index file down on January 10 to update your copy of PortTrak, then if will leave 6549.48 as the value of the DJIA all the way through the 10th. This will correct itself the next time you update the Indexes. The Indexes are Updated, the portfolio has been performing, and you're ready to know how you're doing against the DJIA, S&P, Nasdaq and the Fool. Go to the Charting menu and choose View Chart. PortTrak will prompt you for two pieces of information. It will want to know the dates that you want charted, and it will want to know which of the indexes you want to see your portfolio graphed against. The start date for your chart will show your portfolio and all of the charted indexes in the same place. From there, PortTrak follows your portfolio and the indexes, adjusting for cash that you may have added or removed from your portfolio over time. In other words, the chart you see shows what would have happened if you had invested in the indexes in the same way you invested in your own portfolio, so that it is a real measure of how you performed against them.
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