A tracker answers a different question than a broker app
Your broker tells you what you hold and what it is worth. That is a balance, and a balance is the least interesting fact about a portfolio. What you usually want to know is harder: whether the way you are trading is working, and which habit is costing you.
That distinction decides which tool to use, so it is worth being concrete about what tracking actually gives you that a balance does not.
Realised and unrealised are different kinds of truth
Unrealised P&L is current value minus cost basis — a snapshot that changes every time the market does, and it is the number people stare at. Realised P&L is what actually happened when a position closed, and it is the only one that reflects a decision you made.
A portfolio can look healthy on unrealised gains while every closed trade has lost money, which is the specific pattern of holding winners too briefly and losers too long. You cannot see that from a balance. Tracking both, separately, is what makes it visible.
Hold duration is the habit nobody measures
Every closed position here records how long it was held, in hours. On its own that is trivia. Across fifty trades it is a portrait of how you actually behave, which is usually not how you believe you behave.
The useful comparison is average hold time on winners against losers. If losers are held substantially longer, that is loss aversion operating on you rather than a strategy — and it is one of the few trading problems with a mechanical fix, because a stop rule does not need to be believed, only followed.
Flip count: the metric this one has that most do not
Each position carries a flip number — how many separate times you have round-tripped that same ticker. Open, close, open again, and it is Flip #2.
That number is uncomfortable in a productive way. Three flips in a month on one ticker usually means you are trading your opinion of a company rather than a plan, re-entering each time the story feels good again. It is also invisible in every tool that treats each trade as independent, because individually each one looked reasonable.
Check your highest flip counts. That ticker is where your process is weakest, and the pattern is far easier to see in a number than in memory.
Concentration, which is the risk people actually carry
The analytics view breaks holdings down by sector, which answers a question most people get wrong about their own portfolio. Eight positions feels diversified; eight positions that are all semiconductors, cloud infrastructure and consumer electronics is one bet wearing eight names.
Concentration is not automatically bad — it is how most real returns happen — but carrying it unknowingly is. The number exists so it is a choice rather than an accident.
What "real time" honestly means here
Prices refresh on an interval you set, defaulting to every 30 minutes. Not tick by tick, and saying otherwise would be inventing a capability.
For the questions a tracker answers, that is the right cadence rather than a limitation. Hold duration, realised P&L, flip counts and sector concentration do not change second to second, and a number that updates constantly mostly encourages watching it. If you need live tick data you are day trading, and your broker's terminal is the correct tool.
How to actually use it
- Review closed positions monthly, not daily. The signal is in the pattern, and daily review is just the balance again.
- Compare hold time on winners against losers. That single ratio explains more underperformance than stock selection does.
- Look at your highest flip counts and ask what the thesis was each time.
- Check sector concentration before adding, not after a drawdown.
See the breakdown on portfolio analytics, or create a free account.
Nothing here is financial advice. Portfolio metrics describe what has happened and do not indicate future results.