1. Register and log in
To use Journal.Investments you will need to have created a free account first. You can create an account or log in here
2. Add historic transactions
Adding historic transactions will enable you to view your current portfolio on Journal.Investments, as well as view your investment performance over the preceding years. It will also allow us to give you a breakdown of the drivers of your performance (share price increases, dividends, fees etc.); an assessment of your top winners and losers (as well as your win/loss ratio); and generate cloned portfolios – showing how you would have performed if you had made no changes to your historic portfolios.
You can either add your historic transactions manually yourself or do a bulk upload of your transactions. A bulk upload is recommended if you have lots of transactions.
We are currently working on a system that will allow you to upload a csv file directly, however in the meantime to do a bulk transaction, please send your transaction data, including any deposits, withdrawals, fees and dividends in a csv (excel) file to contact@journal.investments. This will be treated with the strictest confidence and deleted once it has been uploaded.
Once the bulk upload is complete you will be able to manually alter any transactions, and add any notes to those transactions.
To add transactions manually go to My Journal >> Add New Decision / Transaction / Research and fill out the necessary fields. To add deposits, withdrawals, dividends and fees go to My Journal >> Add deposit / withdrawal / dividend received.
3. View your portfolio
Once you have added historic transactions you can view your portfolio by going to My Journal >> Your Portfolio
4. View your performance
Once you have added historic transactions you can also see the drivers of your historic performance to help you understand how you can improve your results.
To see an overview of your performance go to My Journal >> Your Performance.
On the first tab you will see a breakdown of you historic performance including total gains (% and absolute), annualised gains and year to date (YTD) performance. You can also see the drivers of this performance – capital gains, dividends, fees etc.
On the second tab ‘Company Analysis’ you will see a summary of the numbers of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ that you have had, as well as the average performance of your winners and losers. This should help you understand how often you are picking winners, and how well you ‘run your winners and cut your losers’.
There is also a breakdown of all the individual companies you have owned and their performance.
The final tab ‘Cloned Portfolios’ shows you how your historic portfolios would have performed if you had not made any changes to them (i.e. bought or sold anything).
5. Create a checklist
When making investment decisions, it is a good idea to have a checklist of the attributes you are looking for from investments. These can be both quantitative and qualitative.
When adding a decision / transaction of Journal.Investments there is a section to fill out on how that company fits with your personal checklist. For this to be helpful you first need to set up the checklist.
To create your checklist go to My Journal >> View/Edit Checklist
6. Add company notes
There are two types of notes you can add to companies – company overviews and research/decisions.
Company overviews are intended to give you a way to quickly remind yourself of what a company does, and anything else that doesn’t depend on the price of the company and won’t change frequently.
To add a Company Overview go to My Journal >> Add New Company Notes
7. Add new research and decisions
At Journal.Investments we treat each new piece of research as a decision, even if that decision is to do nothing. This allows you to build up a history of research and decisions for individual companies so that you can quickly review your thoughts on the company and also understand why you made certain decisions and learn from that.
As part of each decision you can add notes, a summary of why you made the decision, and assess the company against your personal investment checklist.
To add a new decision, go to My Journal >> Add New Decision / Transaction / Research
8. View/Edit Overviews, Research and Decisions
To view and edit any of your company overviews or decisions go to My Journal >> View/Edit Existing Research and select the company you are looking into.