Personal Stock Monitor 3

Personal Stock Monitor 3.5.3

Release Notes

The biggest change since the 2.x releases is that these release notes also cover the Gold edition of Personal Stock Monitor, which is new as of version 3.0 and includes significantly more features than the Standard edition. Because so many things have changed, these release notes are also more detailed than in previous releases, which should ease the transition for our current customers and serve as a general introduction for our new customers. Please take the time to read through this document to see how these changes affect you.

New Features in 3.5
Enhanced Transaction System

Continuing the progress made with transaction synchronization in previous releases, in this release we have completely overhauled the transaction system to improve a number of deficiencies in previous versions: More transaction types have been added to allow better tracking of a wider range of investing activities, and synchronization has been improved when editing or deleting transactions so that all affected records, including cash symbols, are properly updated. An additional feature that has been added is the ability to cut/copy/paste transactions between ticker symbols.

Due to the changes in the transaction system, there is one new restriction: you can only have one cash symbol per folder or account. This restriction which is necessary in order to implement automatic handling of uninvested funds, as well as automatic recalculation of account balances. Personal Stock Monitor will display an error message if you attempt to create a cash symbol in a folder or account that already has one somewhere in its hierarchy.

In this release current holdings and cash symbols are automatically recalculated based on transactions, therefore all relevant transactions must be present in order for Personal Stock Monitor to come up with the correct numbers. If you believe Personal Stock Monitor is calculating something incorrectly, first check to make sure that all relevant transactions are present in the transaction register before contacting technical support.

Multiple Portfolios

This release also adds the capability to manage multiple completely independent portfolios. All functions related to portfolios, folders/accounts and ticker symbols have been moved under the new Portfolio menu. The portfolios are stored in the same file, but are updated and totalled independently.

Updated User Interface

You can now cut, copy and paste transactions between ticker symbols when you display the Transactions tab in the ticker properties. You can also cut, copy, and paste alerts between ticker symbols when you display the Alerts tab in the ticker properties.

Transition Guide for Users of Previous Versions

Due to the changes made to the transaction system in Personal Stock Monitor 3.5, we wrote this Transition Guide to help you more effectively manage the transition from previous releases. The changes in this release are necessary in order for Personal Stock Monitor to move forward with some of the other improvements our customers have been requesting.

One particular thing to note is that the new transaction system is requires a complete transaction history in order to calculate correct balances for cash symbols as well as to calculate things such as gains correctly. If you have previously skipped entering all transactions, you will need to go back and fill in the missing transactions, or at least enter the appropriate adjusting transactions.

Due to the changes to the transaction system and the new multiple portfolio system, the user interface has been updated: The separate purchase and sale dialogs have been replaced with a single transaction entry dialog which is more consistent and easier to use; In the new transaction dialog, you can enter the total amount and PSM can recalculate the price, shares, or commission; The Symbol menu has been rename Portfolio, and has been slightly rearranged; The Portfolio Detail tab and Transaction tab have been merged into the main securities view, and to view them you select them as options from the View menu.

Some problems you may encounter during the upgrade:

Problem: Cash symbols have an incorrect balance.

Discussion: In this release, cash symbol balances are dynamically recalculated based on the transactions present under the cash symbol and the transactions under any securities (stocks, mutual funds, etc.). If transactions are missing or incorrect, the cash balance will not be correct. It could be as simple as forgetting to enter the opening balance of the cash symbol, or not entering all dividends.

Recommended Solution: Verify against your brokerage statements that all transactions are entered for the cash symbol as well as any securities in the same account. If any transactions are missing, enter them in the appropriate place.

Problem: Ticker symbols display incorrect number of shares.

Discussion: For the same reason that cash symbols may have an incorrect balance, ticker symbols may display an incorrect number of shares.

Recommended Solution: Same as for cash account, verify that all transactions have been entered, and that all transaction amounts match your brokerage statements.

Problem: Gains not calculating correctly.

Discussion: Due to the way transactions were handled in previous releases of Personal Stock Monitor, some combinations of transactions can cause gains to be improperly calculated. For example, if you purchased a stock in multiple lots, then sold all of your holdings at once, Personal Stock Monitor would enter multile sale transactions, one for each lot purchased, and would count the entire sale commission toward the first sale transaction. This was an unfortunate decision on our part, since it can now cause problems with calculations.

Recommended Solution: If a sale got split into multiple lots, edit the first sale transaction to encompass the entire sale and delete the rest of the transactions.

Discussion: As a workaround for entering dividend reinvestments, we previously recommended entering a purchase with a zero price and zero commission.

Recommended Solution: This release of Personal Stock Monitor has a ReinvestDiv transaction type, so you should go back and change these Buy transactions to ReinvestDiv in order to correctly count dividends in the gain calculations. Additionally, any stock dividends paid in cash that were recorded to the cash account should be reentered as dividents to the stock. This step will be important when we implement reporting in future releases.

Discussion: Personal Stock Monitor 3.0.9 and earlier allowed lot selection for sales, but did not store the lot selection information. Since PSM 3.0.9 did not use the transaction register to recalculate anything this was not an apparent problem at the time, but when PSM 3.5 started using the transaction register in this way and did not have the lot selection information it used FIFO order to calculate which lots to sell. Since the wrong lots were selected for sales, the gains would be calculated incorrectly.

Recommended Solution: Personal Stock Monitor 3.5.1 and later includes support lot selection for sale transactions, and stores the lot selection information with the transaction so that the numbers will be correct even if transactions are edited. All you need to do is edit the sale transactions one at a time and press OK, and PSM will ask you to choose lots from which the gains will be calculated. To use FIFO ordering, you can press Cancel at the lot selection dialog, otherwise select a lot and press OK. Unlike 3.0.9 and earlier, PSM 3.5.1 and later can calculate which lots were present at the time of the transaction, so that entering backdated sale transactions becomes possible.

Problem: Split transactions not being taken into account when calculating shares.

Discussion: Versions of Personal Stock Monitor prior to 3.0 did not store the split ratio with the split transactions. Since the transaction register used starting with release 3.5 to calculate the effects of a split, Personal Stock Monitor will not calculate splits correctly. You can see which split transactions have this problem when you display the transaction register, since they will not have a ratio shown in the transaction type column.

Recommended Solution: Delete the offending split transactions and re-enter them with the correct split ratios. This will ensure that the correct split transaction is recorded, and the number of post-split shares will be correctly calculated.

If additional transitional issues are discovered through use, we will post discussion and recommended solutions on our Web site at http://www.dtlink.com. Please visit us often to get any new information.

ChangeLog

3.5.2 to 3.5.3

Added a check for out-of-order transactions when loading file, and automatically reorder by date. This could happen if the file was created with an earlier version of PSM which didn't guarantee that transactions would be stored in date order.
Fix sorting bug with Value Change and Last Size fields.
Add extra diagnostic information for file download and historical download.
Add Reset Values command to Portfolio menu.
Fix bug with deleted symbols appearing in the ticker bar.
Fix bug with deleted symbols being exported.
Fix bug with crashing in transaction view when TOTAL line is selected and Portfolio menu is selected.
Fix bug with not handling blank fields in the transaction edit dialog properly, possibly causing a crash.
Lot selection has been integrated into the transaction edit dialog, making it much easier to edit the order in which lots are sold.
Added first version of Getting Started Guide to distribution, Getting Started Guide menu item to Help menu.
Added Send Test Email button to services configuration.
Fixed gain calculation bug when covering short transactions.
Fixed export bug so that it no longer prompts to replace file if append is selected.

3.5.1 to 3.5.2

Fixed crash-on-save bug.
Additional fixes for problems from the two previous releases.
Added x icon to transactions view (details in online help under Icons topic).

3.5 to 3.5.1

Added Misc Expense, Misc Income, and Margin Int transaction types.
Change Update and Update All commands to be available in all views.
Changed delete function to delete symbols while retaining the associated transactions. This was a frequently asked-for feature. To delete associated transactions you will need to explicitly delete them from the transactions view.
Fix date editing bug with non-MM/DD/YYYY date formats. PSM is once again restricted to MM/DD/YYYY only, but hopefully this restriction will be lifted in a future release once the date edit control is replaced.
Change printout font to be fixed at 10pt.
Added lot selection for sale transactions.
Added view Securities/Transactions/Portfolio Details options to context menu for tabs.
Fix bug that always appended a .txt suffix on exported files.
Fix bug that doesn't export in sort order.
Change Cash symbol types to Cash (Linked) and create new Cash (Other) symbol type that is not recalculated from the ticker symbols. The former is the account that is updated from transactions posted to ticker symbols in the same account. Only one linked cash symbol is allowed per account. The latter is also referred to as an unlinked cash account, and an unlimited number are allowed, but they are only calculated based on the transactions posted directly to the account.
Update cash creation dialog to let you set linked/unlinked type.
Force change of file name on upgrade in order to prevent overwriting of old files.
Restore totals for Change, Shares columns due to popular demand.
Modify rename command to not erase name when changing the symbol.
Modify Portfolio Detail view to work more like the 3.0.9 Portfolio Detail. Now has a separate view profile that includes the portfolio columns.
Added clipboard cut/copy to transaction view. Paste is not available because there is no way to select which instance of a symbol to associate the transactions with. However you can paste them into the transactions tab under ticker properties.
Updated QIF support, add totals to necessary transactions.
Update Dreyfus server parameters.
Remove blanks from imported ticker symbols and names.
Check to make sure quote server overrides for symbols are valid, and reset them if not.
When opening document, scan for and report the two most common problems during conversion from older formats.
Updated transition guide to include additional information about upgrade issues.

v3.0.9 to v3.5

Changed version to 3.5 to reflect the magnitude of the changes since the last release.
Added Avg Age, Total Value and Value Change to columns available for alerts (Gold only).
Fix bug in money market fund handling that would put the yield into the price field. Money market funds should now always display a 1.0 in the Price field.
Update server parameters for Yahoo Australia, Yahoo UK. Both servers now require that exchange suffix be added to the ticker symbol.
Update server parameters for E*Trade Delayed, Customer, and Free Real-Time servers.

Update the "Move to" command to move items between portfolios.
Add capability to copy/cut/paste alerts between ticker symbols.
Fix drag/drop and Move to to restrict placement of cash symbols. Only one cash symbol allowed per account.
Fixed refresh bug with transaction view that was locking out user operations due to constant refreshes.
Fixed bug that could cause a crash during cut/paste or Move.

Fix a "downgrade" bug when it tried to read an .stk file that was created with a newer version.
Add red/green colorization to Value Change column (Gold only).
Fix date selection bug with two-digit dates.
Change to displaying four-digit dates. (PSM previously stored four digits but displayed only two.)
Renamed the Symbol menu to Portfolio.
Added multiple portfolio management commands to Portfolio menu. Each portfolio is represented by a tab on the bottom. Drag/drop of tabs is available.
Added the ability to copy/cut and paste transactions through the Portfolio->Properties->Transactions page and through the Symbol->Properties->General page for Cash accounts.
Transaction Register view converted to an option under the view menu to switch current portfolio to display transactions.
Fix E*Trade (free real-time) login problem
Fix E*Trade quote retrieval for symbols that are substrings of another symbol.
Improve transaction handling to calculate gain properly, update cash account properly, etc.
Force calculation of average cost for purchase transactions
Force complete recalc of cash account after deleting transactions
Allow editing cash transactions (this was not supported at all in previous releases)
Prevent splitting of buy and sell into multiple transactions when dealing with multiple lots.
Allow editing all transactions from Transaction view, using new transaction dialog.
Added Total, Notes fields to transaction view.
Split can now have decimal numerator (ie. 1.5:1)
Add transactions list to Portfolio page (under Symbol Properties).
Fix crash with sending external alerts if network is not started.
Created an alternate root folder arrangement that has separate folder trees for the watch list and portfolio. The new Portfolio view has the following restrictions: all ticker symbols must be inside account folders (no symbols at the top level); Each account folder may have at most one cash account. The new Watch List view has the following restrictions: no cash accounts; no ticker symbols with transactions, except for splits.
Add folder properties dialog. Select Symbol Properties on a folder.
Allow setting the update interval by folder under folder properties dialog. Ticker update algorithm now takes folder overrides into account.
Fix email alert bug with some SMTP servers.
Fix Yahoo UK parameter for ticker name. Fix Yahoo Australia parameter for ticker name.
Fix MS Proxy 2.0-related problems in file downloads.
Add ability to edit transaction total and recalculate one of the other values.
Add ability to display current holdings in Portfolio tab, and to toggle that feature from the View menu.
Add ability to hide ticker symbols with closed positions under View menu.
Fix bug with displaying wait cursor during updates, preventing user from doing anything.
Add command to subscribe to mailing list under Help menu.
Add Set Value command under Symbol menu for manually setting the value of a symbol.
Add Symbol Properties for cash accounts to display cash transactions.
Updated CNNfn, Quote.com parameters
Updated currency table download code because Xenon Labs changed the format of their pages. Otherwise PSM was not able to update the currency conversion table.
Added a Value Change column by popular request, which is (shares * change). Takes into account transactions on the current day.
Renamed Portfolio tab in symbol properties to Transactions.
Add ability to pull up folder and cash properties in Transaction Register view.
Put Notes field on its own page under Symbol Properties.
Fix bug in an internal routine that would wipe out the Swissquote (customer) password.