Investment Categories in a Portfolio

Investment Categories are a powerful tool to improve the organization, tracking and management of your current holdings. You can add categories to the “Prices” or “Fundamentals” view of a Portfolio or Portfolio Group.

Categories are unique to the Portfolio or Portfolio Group in which they are defined. That is, each Portfolio and Portfolio Group has its own set of categories and does not inherit any from other Portfolios or Portfolio Groups.  This gives you the most flexibility in how you categorize your investments at each level. On the downside, it means that if you want to use the same categories in multiple places, you have to recreate them in each Portfolio or Portfolio Group.

A category can contain individual positions as well as other categories, allowing you to create a hierarchy of categories. Categories lines within the Portfolio are shown in bold and display the totals for the contained positions and sub-categories.

An example portfolio that uses categories can be seen in the following image.

Creating A Category

NOTE: Before you create a new Category, we recommended that you turn off any current column sorting. If the lines in the portfolio are being sorting by one of the columns, the Category will not appear where you expect it to and moving items into a Category may not work as you expect. You can turn the sorting back on after you have your Category setup.

To turn off column sorting, click 3 separate times on one of the column headers: the first time will turn on sorting for that column, the 2nd time will change the direction of the sort, the 3rd time will turn off sorting.

1. Select the portfolio where you want to add a category. Then click on the "More" menu in the toolbar and select New Category...

2. In the “Category Properties” window, add a Name and optionally a Description. You can also set the currency to use for the category. When you are done, click the OK button to add the category.

   

   
   

3. You can now start using your category by moving positions and other categories into it.

   

Managing Categories

You can drag-and-drop positions and categories in the portfolio to arrange them to your needs. Only the “Cash” and “Total” lines can not be moved or removed.

Deleting A Category

You can only delete a category if it does not contain any positions or other categories.

1. Select the empty category.

2. Right-click (or ctrl-click on Mac) on the empty category and select Delete Category... from the menu.