Tradesy User’s Guide

Welcome! This is a general overview and reference for Tradesy, a personal finance app for Mac.

What is Tradesy?

Tradesy is a personal finance app for Mac, designed for the small investor. It will help manage your trading: watching stocks, tracking your portfolios, calculating capital gains, and more!

Tradesy runs on MacOS 12 (“Monterey”) or newer.

Features

Getting started

A Tradesy document contains a stock watchlist and any number of portfolios. You can create as many different Tradesy documents as you’d like, and save them as distinct files.

The watchlist and portfolio list appear on the left side of the window, and to the right are displayed the particulars of whichever stock or portfolio is selected. Each of these things is discussed in the following sections.

A sample document, containing a watchlist of several stocks and a couple of fictitious portfolios, can be opened with the Help → Open Sample Document menu command.

Watchlist

Search for a particular stock by entering a name or symbol in the “Search” text field at the top of the window.

To add a stock to the watchlist, click “+”. The watchlist is refreshed at a regular interval to maintain an up-to-date snapshot of performance in the current (or most recent) trading day.

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Stocks? Securities? Equities? Financial instruments? Whatever you call them, they’re things of value that are traded on an exchange and denoted by a alpha-numeric symbol. This document might use a few of these terms interchangeably; they all refer to the same concept in Tradesy.

Stock details

The tab bar in the adjacent main part of the window offers a variety of views and analyses for the selected stock, each of which is discussed next.

Overview

A line graph plots the recent performance.

Click an interval below the graph to choose between the current (or most recent) trading period and a several other common intervals. Hover the mouse over the graph to see the performance at a particular time.

A history of stock splits and dividends, if applicable, is shown below.

History

Detailed historical performance information, in graph and tabular form, can be retrieved for any date range and quantized by a selectable interval by using the controls to the left of the graph. Some common presets are offered in a pop-up menu.

Click in the graph or the table to highlight the corresponding entry in its counterpart.

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See the price adjustment setting for control over how the price values are interpreted in respect of stock splits.

Strategy

Here you can retroactively conduct a trading plan and see what it would have yielded given a stock’s actual past performance. A sequence of hypothetical trades will be evaluated over the date range specified.

The graph will indicate the investment's performance as it compares to a simple buy-and-hold over the same period. The table will show all the transactions that would be made.

Clicking the “Make Batch” button will transfer all of the current parameters over to the Strategy Batch tab, in order to run the same analysis over a range of other time periods.

Strategy Batch

A derivative view of a Strategy, where a similar analysis is performed repeatedly over a series of date ranges.

The graph and table will indicate the final results of each iteration, allowing for visualization of the stability of the algorithm described by the parameters. (For example, an erratic rate of return would prove the algorithm unreliable, while a consistent rate of return might suggest some merit in the parameters.)

Double-clicking on a particular result (in either the table or the graph), or clicking the “Go to Detail” button with a result selected, will transfer that analysis to the Strategy tab in order to examine all the transactions it embodies.

Portfolios

Creating a portfolio

Add a new portfolio by clicking the “+” button or by choosing the Portfolio → New Portfolio… menu command.

In addition to soliciting a name for the portfolio, a couple of options will be presented:

To change the settings for an existing portfolio, choose the Portfolio → Portfolio Settings… menu command.

Once the portfolio contains some transactions, its gross valuation will be shown in the summary and in the graph. A green line atop the graph indicates the net cash deposits made to the portfolio. (When the blue is above the green, you’re in the money.)

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Securities trading in a foreign currency (different from the portfolio currency) will have the appropriate exchange rate for the day applied automatically. The displayed valuations are all shown in the portfolio’s primary currency.

Choose the date range to display by using the controls to the left of the graph. Several common presets are offered in the pop-up menu.

A tab bar beneath the graph provides access to several different tables that provide a view into your portfolio: Transactions, Holdings, and Trading Summary. These are discussed below, but first you will want to log some transactions in the portfolio.

Entering transactions

Logging manually

To add a new transaction, click the “New Transaction” button in the upper right or choose the Portfolio → New Transaction… menu command.

A number of different transaction types are supported.

Importing from a text file

You can import transactions into a portfolio from a CSV (comma-separated values) or tab-delimited text file by using the Portfolio → Import… menu command.

After choosing a file, you’ll be prompted to specify the column layout of the data so that Tradesy can parse the rows.

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Tradesy will make its best interpretation of number and date formatting, though you are free to be explicit about the latter. The specified default currency will be used for interpreting money values if a Transaction Currency column is not specified.

Portfolio details

Transactions

The Transactions tab shows activity in the portfolio’s ledger that occurred during the selected date range, including gains/losses realized thereupon, as well as running share and cash totals.

To edit existing transactions, select one or more and double click, or choose the Portfolio → Modify Transaction… menu command. To delete them, choose Portfolio → Delete Transaction.

If more than one transaction is selected, a subset of available properties will be editable in bulk.

The order of transactions occurring on the same date can be changed by dragging and dropping them within the list.

Holdings

The Holdings tab hows the portfolio holdings and valuations as of the selected “To” date, including the average cost incurred per share, market-value gains seen during the selected period, and market value at the end of the period.

Trading Summary

The Trading Summary tab shows the gains (and/or losses) realized from all trading activity that occurred during the selected date range. Figures herein can be used to correlate with T5008 and T3 forms and for reporting capital gains/losses on the T1 Schedule 3.

Exporting portfolio data

You can export portfolio data from any of the tab views—Transactions, Holdings, and Trading Summary—by choosing the Portfolio → Export… menu command. You’ll be prompted to configure the output format to your liking, including file type (comma- or tab-separated text), date format, and the order of columns.

General settings

Several settings allow you to make Tradesy work the best for you.

Time zone

Options in the View → Time Zone menu control how the time is displayed in the graphs and market performance data:

Quote price adjustment

Options in the View → Price Adjustment menu provide control over the display of quote price values as shown in the equity Overview and History tabs:

Investopedia has an article that discusses the concepts at hand.

Checking for app updates

Tradesy will periodically check for new versions of the app and notify you if one is available. To disable this behaviour, choose the Tradesy → Settings… menu command and turn off the Check for app updates automatically checkbox.

By default only official release versions will be sought. If you’d like to receive beta builds as well, enable the Update to pre-release versions checkbox.

Help and support

Visit the Tradesy web site for the latest. You may e-mail Zygoat Support for help, and consider joining the Tradesy e-mail list for discussion with other users and to stay abreast of upcoming work.

When Tradesy is running in trial mode, some features are purposefully limited. Buy your Tradesy licence to unlock full functionality and help support future development.

Limitations

Debugging tools

Additional diagnostic tools are available by enabling a hidden setting (issue defaults write ca.zygoat.Tradesy diagnosticToolsEnabled -bool true at a Terminal prompt).

Release notes

Recent release notes and version history are on a separate page.



Copyright 2021–2024 by Ben Kennedy (d.b.a. Zygoat Creative Technical Services), Vancouver, BC.