I am trying to understand how to make the best use of transactional portfolios. At first I thought it is useful when tracking the performance of a self-managed fund. You add cash to it, transact in equities, adding each transaction to the portfolio. It then shows you its performance wrt. to a benchmark. The broker does this for you anyway, but the whole reason I started evaluating Portfolioslab is so that I can separate my single broker account into thematic baskets ("thematic funds") and track their performance individually.

The transactional portfolio in Portfolioslab does not seem to work that way. It does not consider the changes in cash position, ie. any profit/loss made on equity transactions. It does not seem to be suited for track the assets of a fund, so to speak. What good is transactional portfolio then?

Hey,

There are many use cases for transactional portfolios. They allow for more precise tracking of portfolio performance, enabling, for example, the calculation of risk-adjusted performance and other indicators, which many brokerages do not offer. This data can be used to adjust your investment strategy or for tools like portfolio optimization. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "It does not consider the changes in cash position, i.e., any profit/loss made on equity transactions." All profits and losses should be reflected in the resulting performance chart unless I'm missing something.

Just to add to this. I tried uploading part of my transactions, but whenever I sold off my positions entirely - going to 100% cash - the portfolio performance chart went to zero. It then stayed at zero for the rest of the transactions.

Might have something to do with all my portfolio currencies being locked (grey box) to USD, rather than my currency, GBP.