Quick recap
Cash Balance allows you to easily track the amount of cash you currently have by tracking cash movements due to buy/sell transactions and dividends payments.
However, just knowing how much cash we have currently might not be enough for some, and several users have independently requested to let cash be considered as part of the current portfolio so that we can understand how our cash influences our risk, returns, and other metrics.
So last weekend, I spent time implementing it. If you enable it, you will see that a new “stock holding” named CASH in your current portfolio.
Basically, CASH will be included in your current portfolio, and will affect various computations in pages related to current portfolio (e.g. portfolio overview page, portfolio performance page, etc).
However, the portfolio report page will not take cash into account and remain unchanged. This is because for portfolio report to generate the numbers shown in the report, accurate historical information is needed. Simply having the current cash balance alone is insufficient.
To summarize
If you are already using Cash Balance feature and want to add CASH to your current portfolio:
– On this page, check the “Add Cash to Portfolio” box
If you are currently not using Cash Balance feature but want to add CASH to your current portfolio:
– Activate Cash Balance by following this tutorial
– On this page, check the “Add Cash to Portfolio” box
If you don’t want to use the new feature (CASH will not be reflected in your current portfolio):
– You do not need to do anything
As always, we welcome suggestions, questions, and bug reports.
Continue to stay safe, in both investments and health!
Wonderful! Thanks!
thanks evan. great addition. quick ask, considering how many of us hold liquid cash in ‘high’ interest saving accounts (360, multiplier, one etc), possible to allow manual adding of monthly dividends (interest) into it?
this way the yield on cash can be reflected on overall portfolio as well. as it stands now, portfolio metrics are skewed quite a bit when i enable this new feature.
Hmm.. That is an interesting idea.. My first thought is simply to make it possible to perform manual dividend override to CASH. Although CASH is not meant to have history (at least at this point in current portfolio) and having dividends attach to it might be weird.
Wonder if we should account for this on the Other Assets?
if im not wrong, Other Assets doesn’t reflect under main portfolio metrics?
“Other Assets doesn’t reflect under main portfolio metrics?” => Yup. At least not yet.
Started enabling, I think have to do a bit of reconciliation for cash balance, but its working in the way I expect it too.
On natcin’s point, so far what I have done is to click on the cash balance / cash transactions to add cash received from interest so that the cash balance in the subportfolio makes sense (only tried to reconcile for my SSB subportfolio which has the least transactions).
Also on natcin’s point, I don’t consider all cash, only the portion that is “allowed” for investing (versus the reserve and emergency funds), so I pretty much take out the interest from the equation.
Spent more time thinking about @natcin suggestion. I think there are a few ways to do this.
1) As @takingstock mention, only include 0% or close to 0% cash. And keep high interest cash in other assets.
2) Allow the adding of dividends to cash in portfolio, and all dividends before today would be considered as interest received for current cash. And dividends stated in future dates would be contribute to projected yields for the CASH. User would have to do regular manual up keeping as today date is constantly changing.
Personally, I think if we implement number 2, we are blurring the line too much between Stock Portfolio and Other Assets. Stock Portfolio is meant for assets where StocksCafe have information on such as end of day pricing, dividends etc and requires minimal manual intervention whereas Other Assets are for assets where StocksCafe do not know much about and therefore requires good amount of manual work from user to keep it current.
Might be better to invest more in improving Other Assets graphing and metrics computation.
maybe just have some option to show all assets metrics (combining stocks + other assets)?
i guess everyone has very different portfolio allocations and instruments/holdings.
for me, it is quite simple, cash + stocks. would be great if i can see overall avg yield of my combined assets. for e.g. 30k stocks at avg 5% yield, 10k cash at avg 2% interest, my overall is 4.25%. % goes down the more cash i hold, and vice versa, and helps with overall long-term planning and balancing.
personally i am okay with manually adding monthly interest.
again, this is just a ‘good to have’ function, since we are on this topic. current portfolio functions as is are still good nonetheless! thanks!
“maybe just have some option to show all assets metrics (combining stocks + other assets)?” => I agree. Dashboard is meant to be a place to combine stocks and other assets. Definitely, an area of improvements.
Hi Evan,
Thanks for this feature. How do I edit the CASH component? Does it automatically calculates the CASH from dividends in different currencies and then convert back to home currency?
TIA
Hi TIA,
You need to first activate the feature -> “Activate Cash Balance by following this tutorial”