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3. Loading Your Trades

In Chapter 1, we loaded one tradebook and saw our positions appear. That is the whole job for many members, most of the time. This chapter covers the rest of it: keeping your trades current as months go by, keeping separate sets of trades apart, and filling the gaps a tradebook can leave.

We'll cover:

  • keeping your tradebooks up to date,
  • portfolios, for keeping sets of trades apart,
  • residual fix-ups, for sales that have no matching purchase in your tradebooks,
  • and three events a tradebook never records: IPO allotments, buybacks and rights issues.

Our example tradebook loads with nothing to fix, so for most of this chapter we use a second, small one, made for the purpose. It holds 10 trades in 7 stocks, and each of those stocks shows one kind of gap. We load it into a portfolio of its own, called Book issues, and work through each gap in turn. To follow along, download it here: tradebook_with_issues.csv.

Let's begin with keeping your tradebooks current.