AlertDesk 0.2.11

Prices

AlertDesk shows each position's latest price, its unrealized P/L, a price chart on each ticker's page, and how your closes have worked out since. Prices are fetched by your computer, for your own personal use.

Steps

  1. Choose the source in Settings → Prices: Yahoo Finance (free, for personal use) is the default. Or choose None: everything else works, and prices say "no prices".
  2. The market keeps New York time, and so does AlertDesk for everything about trading -- the day a price is "as of", days to expiry, what's still in force -- wherever your computer is; times it shows you (kept, checked, backed up) are your own. When your clock isn't on New York time, a market date says "(New York)".
  3. Prices are fetched only for what needs them: your open positions (paper too), the paid services' recs still in force, and options you closed, until their last trading day. A stock or fund you've sold isn't fetched again.
  4. A mutual fund is a position like shares, marked fund, priced at its daily NAV — which the fund posts in the evening: until 7 PM New York time it shows the day before's, "as of" that day. A money-market or sweep fund (the one your broker keeps your cash in) is your account's cash, not a position.
  5. Option prices are saved each evening, shortly after the market closes (4:05 PM New York time, 1:05 PM on a half day), for every contract you hold (paper too), every contract a paid alert names, and every contract you closed, until its last day (Exit Timing measures your close against it).
  6. Leave AlertDesk open in the evening. Yahoo keeps no history for options: if the computer is off that evening and isn't opened before the next morning's market open, that day has no price for options. AlertDesk says "no price — not scored" for it; it never guesses.
  7. An option that expired is valued from the underlying stock's close on expiry day: "expired · worthless" or "expired · worth $X". A paper option settles on its own at expiry.

What you should see

If it doesn't work