How to see a portfolio's overall profit or loss on Yahoo Finance?
The steps that I could imagine following:
"The Yahoo Finance API is no longer available, so Finance::Quote needs to point at something else.  Recent versions of Finance::Quote can use AlphaVantage as a replacement for the Yahoo Finance API, but individual users need to acquire and input an AlphaVantage API key. Pretty decent documentation for how to this is available at the GnuCash wiki. Once you've followed the directions on the wiki and set the API key, you still need to tell each individual security to use AlphaVantage rather than Yahoo Finance: As a warning, I've been having intermittent trouble with AlphaVantage.  From the GnuCash wiki:  Be patient. Alphavantage does not have the resources that Yahoo! did and it is common for quote requests to time out, which GnuCash will present as ""unknown error"". I've certainly been experiencing those errors, though not always." "To answer your question directly..  you can investigate by using google or other means to look up research done in this area.  There's been a bunch of it Here's an example of search terms that returns a wealth of information. effect+of+periodic+rebalancing+on+portfolio+return I'd especially look for stuff that appears to be academic papers etc, and then raid the 'references' section of those.  Look for stuff published in industry journals such as ""Journal of Portfolio Management"" as an example. If you want to try out different models yourself and see what works and what doesn't, this Monte Carlo Simulator might be something you would find useful The basic theory for those that don't know is that various parts of a larger market do not usually move in perfect lockstep, but go through cycles.. one year tech might be hot, the next year it's healthcare.  Or for an international portfolio, one year korea might be doing fantastic only to slow down and have another country perform better the next year.    So the idea of re-balancing is that since these things tend to be cyclic, you can get a higher return if you sell part of a slice that is doing well (e.g. sell at the high) and invest it in one that is not (buy at the low) Because you do this based on some criteria, it helps circumvent the human tendency to 'hold on to a winner too long' (how many times have you heard someone say 'but it's doing so well, why do I want to sell now""? presuming trends will continue and they will 'lose out' on future gains, only to miss the peak and ride the thing down back into mediocrity.)  Depending on the volatility of the specific market, and the various slices, using re balancing can get you a pretty reasonable 'lift' above the market average, for relatively low risk. generally the more volatile the market, (such as say an emerging markets portfolio) the more opportunity for lift. I looked into this myself a number of years back, the concensus I came was that the most effective method was to rebalance based on 'need' rather than time.  Need is defined as one or more of the 'slices' in your portfolio being more than 8% above or below the average.  So you use that as the trigger. How you rebalance depends to some degree on if the portfolio is taxable or not.  If in a tax deferred account, you can simply sell off whatever is above baseline and use it to buy up the stuff that is below.   If you are subject to taxes and don't want to trigger any short term gains, then you may have to be more careful in terms of what you sell.  Alternatively if you are adding funds to the portfolio, you can alter how your distribute the new money coming into the portfolio in order to bring up whatever is below the baseline (which takes a bit more time, but incurs no tax hit)  The other question is how will you slice a given market?  by company size?  by 'sectors' such as tech/finance/industrial/healthcare, by geographic regions?" Also, Amazon doesn't care about profits as much as it cares about market share. Where before Whole Foods' management had to seek profit growth to keep stockholders happy, I can see Amazon running Whole Foods at a breakeven point or even a loss if it means that it allows Amazon to extend the reach of same-day Prime delivery and overall Prime membership numbers.  I mean, if you think about it, Amazon could basically start turning Whole Foods stores into essentially warehouses for food delivery that also sell food the normal retail way. That would make just breaking even on the stores a better option than if Amazon had built their own same-day Prime food delivery warehouses across the country. Looks like there are no specific rule in India to prevent Wash sales. See the link below.  http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/wealth/personal-finance-news/investors-can-rejig-portfolio-book-short-term-loss-to-save-tax/articleshow/7812788.cms?intenttarget=no In order to see whether you can buy or sell some given quantity of a stock at the current bid price, you need a counterparty (a buyer) who is willing to buy the number of stocks you are wishing to offload. To see whether such a counterparty exists, you can look at the stock's order book, or level two feed. The order book shows all the people who have placed buy or sell orders, the price they are willing to pay, and the quantity they demand at that price. Here is the order book from earlier this morning for the British pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline PLC.  Let's start by looking at the left-hand blue part of the book, beneath the yellow strip. This is called the Buy side. The book is sorted with the highest price at the top, because this is the best price that a seller can presently obtain. If several buyers bid at the same price, then the oldest entry on the book takes precedence. You can see we have five buyers each willing to pay 1543.0 p (that's 1543 British pence, or £15.43) per share. Therefore the current bid price for this instrument is 1543.0. The first buyer wants 175 shares, the next, 300, and so on. The total volume that is demanded at 1543.0p is 2435 shares. This information is summarized on the yellow strip: 5 buyers, total volume of 2435, at 1543.0. These are all buyers who want to buy right now and the exchange will make the trade happen immediately if you put in a sell order for 1543.0 p or less. If you want to sell 2435 shares or fewer, you are good to go. The important thing to note is that once you sell these bidders a total of 2435 shares, then their orders are fulfilled and they will be removed from the order book. At this point, the next bidder is promoted up the book; but his price is 1542.5, 0.5 p lower than before. Absent any further changes to the order book, the bid price will decrease to 1542.5 p. This makes sense because you are selling a lot of shares so you'd expect the market price to be depressed. This information will be disseminated to the level one feed and the level one graph of the stock price will be updated. Thus if you have more than 2435 shares to sell, you cannot expect to execute your order at the bid price in one go. Of course, the more shares you are trying to get rid of, the further down the buy side you will have to go. In reality for a highly liquid stock as this, the order book receives many amendments per second and it is unlikely that your trade would make much difference. On the right hand side of the display you can see the recent trades: these are the times the trades were done (or notified to the exchange), the price of the trade, the volume and the trade type (AT means automatic trade).  GlaxoSmithKline is a highly liquid stock with many willing buyers and sellers. But some stocks are less liquid. In order to enable traders to find a counterparty at short notice, exchanges often require less liquid stocks to have market makers. A market maker places buy and sell orders simultaneously, with a spread between the two prices so that they can profit from each transaction. For instance Diurnal Group PLC has had no trades today and no quotes. It has a more complicated order book, enabling both ordinary buyers and sellers to list if they wish, but market makers are separated out at the top. Here you can see that three market makers are providing liquidity on this stock, Peel Hunt (PEEL), Numis (NUMS) and Winterflood (WINS). They have a very unpalatable spread of over 5% between their bid and offer prices. Further in each case the sum total that they are willing to trade is 3000 shares. If you have more than three thousand Dirunal Group shares to sell, you would have to wait for the market makers to come back with a new quote after you'd sold the first 3000. Yup. What I wanted to know was where they are pulling it up from. Have casually used Google finance for personal investments, but they suck at corp actions. Not sure if they provide free APIs, but that would probably suck too! :D Well, kind of XD. I usually just look through Business Week for the ADRs that are on the OTC market. I don't do anything major, but why I love them is that they have a greater reach than just ADRs on the NYSE or NASDAQ. Like for instance, if I wanted to own Thai or European stocks, many of the larger, more reputable firms are listed on the OTC market. Having said that, most other sites don't have earnings reports laid out for you. Business Week does. The only fancy thing I am interested in are options and options on futures, and Bar Chart is good for the latter. "I think for this a picture is worth a thousand words.  This is a ""depth chart"" that I pulled from google images, specifically because it doesn't name any security.  On the left you have all of the ""bids"" to buy this security, on the right you have the ""asks"" to sell the security.  In the middle you have the bid/ask spread, this is the space between the highest bid and the lowest ask.  As you can see you are free to place you order to the market to buy for 232, and someone else is free to place their order to the market to sell for 234.  When the bid and the ask match there's a transaction for the maximum number of available shares.  Alternatively, someone can place a market order to buy or sell and they'll just take the current market price. Retail investors don't really get access to this kind of chart from their brokers because for the most part the information isn't terribly relevant at the retail level."