Rebuild a Portfolio from its Transactions

StockMarketEye does its best to automatically keep your portfolio (“Prices” view - i.e. your current holdings) and the portfolio’s transactions list in sync. However, there are times when the “Prices” and “Transactions” can get out of sync. For these situations, StockMarketEye provides a way to rebuild the Prices view from the Transactions.

Why do they need to be in sync?

Keeping the Prices view and the Transactions in sync is important in order to keep an accurate view of your current holdings. It also is important for calculating the historical values of your portfolio, including those used in the portfolio’s Market Value chart, the portfolio’s return values in the Summary report, and the Back-in-Time report.

In these situations, where the historical values of your portfolio are used, StockMarketEye will play back the transactions one day at a time, in order to chronologically build the Prices view and record the resulting values. All calculations that are based on historical data use these generated values, so keeping the transactions list complete and correct ensures that StockMarketEye can correctly and accurately calculate historical values and returns.

When might I need to rebuild the Prices view?

There are 2 main situations when portfolio synchronization is necessary.

  1. Changing the details of a split, such as its date of execution, or any of the transactions on the split stock can cause the Prices view to get out of sync with the transactions. In this case you will need to run the rebuild the Prices view manually.
  2. You have added (manually or via import) past transactions that shouldn’t affect your current Prices view, but due to the way StockMarketEye applies transactions, the Prices view was incorrectly modified.

It’s also possible that other situations or even a bug in StockMarketEye may have caused your Prices view to get out of sync. In these cases, you may also want to rebuild it from the transactions.

Starting The Portfolio Rebuilding Tool

You can run the tool from the "More" button on the Portfolio's toolbar, then select "Rebuild Portfolio..." from the dropdown menu.

Rebuild Options

The portfolio rebuilding tool presents the options you can use during the rebuild process.

Select the type of rebuild to be performed

There are 2 types of rebuild possible, unless you have split transactions in your portfolio, in which case, only the first type is available.

  1. Rebuild Portfolio from Transactions - Recommended

    This method chronologically applies the transactions of your portfolio to build a new portfolio. The new portfolio will replace the current portfolio (“Prices” view).

    You can preview how this new portfolio will look by clicking on the “Preview” button (pointed to by the red arrow in the image).

    After the rebuild is finished, you may need to adjust the portfolio’s cash balance. You can do this using the "Other" button on the Portfolio's toolbar, then clicking on " Add Cash Transaction..."  Be sure to select the appropriate date for the transaction (typically before the first "Buy" transaction).

  2. Rebuild Transactions from Portfolio

    This is the opposite of the recommended method. The transactions of your portfolio will be updated to correspond to the items from the current “Prices” view. This method is normally not recommended as differences can remain between the “Prices” view and the “Transactions” view.

    This method can be useful, however, if your transactions and portfolio differ significantly. This could have occurred with older versions of StockMarketEye which did not maintain the transactions log or allowed transactions to be removed or modified without removing or modifying the corresponding portfolio item.

    NOTE: This method will not be available if your transactions contain any splits.

    NOTE: This method will delete all of the transactions in the portfolio and replace them with simple "Buy" transactions for your current holdings.

Optionally make a backup file before rebuilding

Making a backup is recommended, at least the first time you run the rebuilding tool. Having a backup available allows you to get your portfolio back to the pre-rebuild form, in case the changes made by the rebuilding tool were not to your liking.

Click the “Rebuild” button to start the rebuilding process.

I still see differences and inconsistencies!?!

After rebuilding, the Prices view of your portfolio will correspond to the transactions that are recorded in the Transactions report.

If you still see differences or inconsistencies in any of the related areas (Market Value chart, Back-in-Time chart, Summary report, etc), there are a couple of things to verify:

  1. Double check all of your transactions in the Transactions report. Ensure that all of the transactions have been entered, and that their values (i.e. number of shares, prices, dates, etc) are consistent and correct. If needed, make corrections or additions, then re-run the rebuild too.
  2. If your portfolio currently contains a symbol for which historical quote data is not available, you may see different values than you would expect. In this case, when calculating the value of the portfolio on any given day, StockMarketEye will simply use the purchase price of that position, rather than the actual value of that position on that day. If the current value of that position is higher or lower than the purchase value, that difference will be carried over into the portfolio’s calculated values for that day.

Notes on the Rebuild

  • The rebuild will automatically calculate the "Distribution" and "Shares Affected" values for distribution-type (i.e. dividends, cap-gains, RoC, etc) transactions.

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