For our customers using the Yahoo data services who are interested in getting futures data, I would like to point out Yahoo's futures finder at the following URL:  http://finance.yahoo.com/futures.  After you find the ticker symbol you are looking for, just copy it into PSM and you will be able to track that commodity.

Intuit, makers of Quicken, created a file format for saving and loading financial data called the Quicken Interchange Format, or QIF. If you have portfolio data in Quicken or some other program that supports exporting in QIF format, you can easily import that data into Personal Stock Monitor. 

Let's assume you have a portfolio portfolio account in Quicken similar to the following:

You can export your portfolio account by going to the File->Export->QIF File menu option:

On the resulting screen:

• select the portfolio account you would like to export from.
• make sure to check the Security Lists option. If you do not do the the ticker symbols will not be included in the exported QIF file.

Click Browse to select the a name for the QIF file. I suggest putting it in My Documents folder and naming it something that you will easily remember, such as "transactions".

Click OK on the file open dialog and then OK on the QIF Export. You can then quit Quicken and open Personal Stock Monitor.

In Personal Stock Monitor select the Account -> Create New Account Tab menu option:

You will be presented with the New Account Tab Wizard. Check the circle next to "Import Transactions from a QIF File" and click next:

On the next screen, enter a name for your new account tab such as "MyPortfolio".

Click the Browse button to select the QIF file you exported into "transactions.qif" in the My Document folder above:

Click Open. Then Click Next in the New Account Tab Wizard.

On the next screen, set the current cash balance for the account and the date the account was created:

Click Next and you will be presented the final screen of the wizard.

Click Finished. You should now see your portfolio inside Personal Stock Monitor:

If you have any questions or comments, please register for an account on this site and post a comment here or participate in our forum.

Personal Stock Monitor supports importing entire stock market portfolios from specially formatted Comma-Separated Values files also known as CSV files. This can be an effective means of moving existing portfolios from other software, sites or spreadsheets into PSM.

We recommend using a spreadsheet program, such as Microsoft Excel or Open Office Calc, to create the CSV files.

When importing transactions, Personal Stock Monitor will expect the the first row to contain the names of the columns. These are:

• Date - the date of the transaction in MM/DD/YYYY format
  
• Symbol - the ticker symbol for the security. See below.
  
• Type - the type of transactions. See below.
  
• Shares - the number of shares or contracts represented by this transaction.
  
• Price - the price or dollar amount. See below.
  
• Commission - the trading commission or brokerage fee.
  
• Fee - misc fees.
  
• Notes - any notes you would like to include.
  

These column names must be included exactly as they are written above, including capitalization. Not all transaction types fill in all columns. For instance, in the case of a cash Deposit transaction, only the Symbol and Price columns are filled in, where the symbol should be "cash".

Ticker Symbol

So that Personal Stock Monitor can get quotes for a given security, the correct ticker symbol needs to be included for that security in the Symbol column. What complicates this is that different stock market data providers use slightly different ticker symbol naming conventions.

When in doubt about a particular ticker symbol, you can use the Find Ticker By Name tool available from the Account -> Find Ticker By Name menu option in Personal Stock Monitor:

Enter the name of the security in the Find Name box and press Start Lookup. The ticker symbol will be listed in the Symbol column.

Transaction Type

Personal Stock Monitor includes a transaction register that supports all the common types of stock market transactions investors encounter. The values entered into the Type column in the spreadsheet must match the names used in the software. The type names used must match what's displayed in the software exactly. The transaction types supported are:

• Buy  - Normal purchase transaction.
• Sell - Normal sale transaction.
• Sell Short - Short sale transaction.
• Buy to Cover - Buy to cover a short sale.
• Split - Stock split or reverse split.
• Dividend - Cash dividend; Can also be money market account dividend.
• Reinvest Div - Dividend reinvested for stock.
• Transfer In - Transfer of shares into the account from an outside source.
• Transfer Out - Transfer of shares out of the account.
• MiscExpense - Miscellaneous expense or account maintenance charges.
• MiscIncome - Miscellaneous income.
• Deposit - Cash deposit.
• Withdraw - Cash withdrawal.
• Interest - Cash interest.
• Margin Int - Margin interest charges paid on a margin account balance.
• Return of Capital - Return of Capital
• Buy to Open - Buy options to establish a long position
• Sell to Close - Sell options to close out a long position.
• Sell to Open - Sell options to establish a short position.
• Buy to Close - Buy options to close out a short position.
  

Price

The Price column has a dual meaning depending on the type of transactions. In most cases, Price means the price of the security or option, but in the case of cash transactions the Price column represents the total cash involved. For instance, in the case of a Deposit transaction, Price represents the total money deposited.

Creating a Spreadsheet

Set up your spreadsheet as shown in the image below. The first row should include all the column names from the list above. The order is not important.

Each transaction is listed on it's own row. Again, the ticker symbol must be valid for the stock market data provider you are using. The transaction type must match the name used in Personal Stock Monitor exactly.

Once you have set up your spreadsheet, you can save it out as a Comma Separate Values file from the File->Save As menu item in Excel:

From the Save As dialog select Save In "My Documents", enter a file name such as "transactions" that you will remember and select Save as Type "CSV (comma delimited).

You will likely get a warning message from Excel that resembles:

Just click yes and then close Excel.

Open Personal Stock Montor and select the Accounts -> New Account Tab menu item:

This will bring up the New Account Tab wizard. Check the circle next to the Import transactions from a CSV file option. Click next.

On the next screen give your new account tab a descriptive name and then click browse:

Select the transactions CSV file you exported from Excel above:

Click Open and then click Next in the wizard. If your transactions included a cash deposit you will now be done, otherwise you will be presented the Set Cash Balance screen:

Set the cash balance and as of date for your account and click next.

Click Finished. You should now see your transactions in Personal Stock Monitor:

If you ran into any problems such as including an invalid transaction type or column header you can simply delete the create tab, fix the problem and try again.

If you have a lot of transactions in some other software or website, we would very much like to hear about it. Please register for an account here and leave a comment to this article or post in the forum.

Personal Stock Monitor supports importing stock market data from a variety of different file formats including the Comma-Separated Values format, or CSV, which can be created by most spreadsheet programs.

For some users, it's more convenient to create a spreadsheet of tickers than it is to enter the tickers into the software directly. That being said, you can also copy and paste lists of tickers into Personal Stock Monitor using CNTRL-V, or Edit->Paste, to paste the tickers into the Active securties view.

To create a ticker list that PSM can import, just enter the tickers in the first column of the spreadsheet, one ticker per cell:

The save the file out as a CSV file, select the File->Save As menu item. Save the file in My Documents, provide a name that you'll remember and make sure to select CSV (comma delimited) as the file type.

You will likely receive two warning from Excel when saving out the CSV file:

Click OK. You may then receive the following warning:

Click YES.

At this point you have a CSV file located in "My Documents" called ticker_symbols_list. Close Excel and open Personal Stock Monitor. Create a new account tab to hold your new list of tickers by going to the Account->Create New Account Tab.

You'll then be presented with the New Account Tab Wizard which gives you a number of options for importing data into your new account. Check the box next to Import a list of tickers from a CSV file and click next.

On the next screen, give your new account a descriptive name which will appear in a tab along the bottom:

Click the Browse button to find your ticker_symbols_list CSV file in the My Document folder you created above. Make sure to select csv in the Files of Type dropdown:

Click Open. Then click Next in the wizard. If you get a "File Access" error it likely means that you left the CSV file open in Excel.

On the next screen you can select a cash balance for the account. This represents the amount of tradeable cash you have in your brokerage account at the present moment:

In this example we're assuming that you do not have any open positions for the tickers you are importing. Click Next for the final screen of the wizard:

Click finished. At this point your list of tickers has been imported into Personal Stock Monitor:

If you have existing transactions, please read the Importing Transactions from a CSV file article.

Last month we were hit with an unusual problem: Yahoo had inadvertently inserted some bad character data into their data stream for several popular stocks (including AMZN).  This problem was fixed very quickly, but there was a time window during which if you closed Personal Stock Monitor, that bad data was saved to your file.  The problem was that this bad data exposed a bug in the code that reads back the data, which caused a lot of data to disappear from the screen.  This would not be so bad if you then didn't immediately save the file, but for the people who did this and contacted us about it, unfortunately this resulted in data loss.

While this sequence of events definitely pointed out what we should do to fix our software in case this should happen in the future, it also shed light on another big problem: our customers have not been backing up their important data.  In fact, it seems some customers have been running with the same data files for years without making a single backup.  (Yes, you know who you are.  :)  )  Because our software had been extremely reliable up to this point, and their computers had been extremely reliable up to this point, this problem with Yahoo caused those few people to lose a lot of data, and unfortunately we could do nothing to recover it.

This reminded me of another fact: in our position, we get a lot of requests from customers to re-send license keys, and often they will mention a hardware failure such as a hard drive crash.  I had never before wondered what other data they might have lost in that same crash, because it stands to reason that if you lost your license key, you may have also lost your important data.  Most people would be surprised how often hard drives fail.  I've had personal experience with about a half dozen hard drive failures the years, and have only been able to recover data in a couple of instances.

So that brings me to my point: it seems that some of our customers, as a representative sample of computer users of all levels of experience, are not making regular backups, despite cheap external hard drives and USB memory sticks, and universal availability of backup software, either included free with the hard drive or available free on the Internet.  Even the most basic procedure of regularly dragging and dropping important files from the built-in hard drive on your computer to an external device could save years of work.

One thought that crossed my mind with regards to this issue is that perhaps customers don't know where their important data files are located on their hard drives.  This is certainly possible, because as I mentioned we do have customers with widely varying levels of computer experience.  Some customers may need assistance with basic computer tasks such as installing backup software and setting it up properly.  This is quite understandable, and unfortunately is beyond the scope of what we can help them with.  (However we would certainly encourage those customers to seek assistance with getting their backups set up.)

We're not going make our customers go out and buy an external hard drive, install backup software, etc., because that's their responsibility.  But the least we could do, since it is something over which we have some level of control, is to reduce the possibility of future data loss by including an automatic backup feature in Personal Stock Monitor.  (Even though we have had a Backup command under the File menu for years, which some people used, but many people had apparently not discovered it.)  What this new feature does, based on your preferences, is to either ask to make a backup, or automatically make a backup, of the current data file containing your ticker lists and portfolio data.  It places the new file in the same folder on your hard drive as the original data file, but adds a timestamp to the file name so you know what date the backup was made.  By default, on new installations this happens once every seven days, so at most you would lose seven days of data.  For frequent traders, we would advise reducing the backup interval so that you always have recent data available.

Realizing that this does not help customers who don't know where the data is stored by default, that location is C:\Documents (or C:\Documents and Settings, depending on which version of windows you're running) \[your user name]\My Documents\My Portfolios.  If you have automatic backup software that takes care of moving your important files to an external drive, you can set it up to automatically back up this folder.

With that, I will end this long post by encouraging everyone, not just our customers, but everyone, to make frequent backups of their important data.  This will avoid potentially costly problems in the future.