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
- 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".
- 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)".
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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
- On Positions: a Price and an Unrealized P/L for each position, with the day and the source under the price.
- On a ticker's page: its daily closes with A (a service's alert), B (your buy) and C (your close).
- On Exit Timing: each close against the service's exit or the contract's last day; a close still waiting for that day shows its reading so far.
If it doesn't work
- "No price yet for ABCDX, WXYZ" (Health and Here's what's going on): those instruments got no price this time, said why in plain words; every other price was updated. The price source's own message is in Copy diagnostics on Health.
- Health says "Prices not updated since …": no price at all could be fetched (the computer was off or offline, or Yahoo didn't answer). AlertDesk tries again on its own; nothing wrong is shown meanwhile.
- A position says "no price": nothing has been saved for it yet (a new ticker gets its first prices the next evening), or the source didn't list it.
- Yahoo changes things now and then and the free source can stop working for a while. Choose None in Settings → Prices to switch prices off until it's fixed.