How to track crypto and stocks in one portfolio

How much money do you actually have? Go on, say the number. If your shares live in a brokerage, your crypto sits on an exchange, and a chunk has been swept off into a cold wallet for safekeeping, you almost certainly cannot, not without opening three apps and doing the arithmetic in your head. I think you should be able to track crypto and stocks in one portfolio, see one honest net worth number, and stop pretending the spreadsheet you keep meaning to update counts for anything. Twenty minutes and a stubborn streak gets you there.

Why your crypto and stocks live in separate apps

Nobody decided this on purpose. It just happened, one signup at a time. You opened a brokerage because that is where shares and funds go. Then crypto turned up, did not fit the brokerage, and you opened an exchange account. Then you got sensibly nervous about leaving coins on an exchange and moved some to a cold wallet, because not your keys, not your coins. Each move was the right call on its own. The result is a financial life smeared across three or four places that have never once spoken to each other.

And each app is delighted to show you a number. The brokerage shows your shares. The exchange shows your tokens, the wallet a balance. What none of them shows is the only figure that matters: everything you own, added up, in one currency, right now. The industry is weirdly comfortable leaving you to do that last sum in your head, badly, every time you want to know where you stand.

The problem with bolting two trackers together

The obvious fix is an app that promises to link all of it for you, letting a robot middleman log in and copy everything out. We have written before about why handing your logins to a stranger is a worse deal than it looks, in track your portfolio without linking your bank. But mixing crypto and stocks makes the linking route worse in a way that is specific and ugly.

A brokerage feed and a crypto exchange feed are two different robots, written by different teams and breaking whenever they each feel like it. One stalls at last week’s value. The other doubles a position after the exchange tweaks a login page. And your cold wallet, designed so that nothing can reach into it, cannot be linked at all, which means the link-everything dream quietly drops the assets you were most careful about. Two feeds that disagree, one wallet that is missing, and somehow you are meant to call this consolidation.

A book stitched together from sources that never reconcile is not one view. It is several views in a trench coat. When the total looks wrong, you cannot tell whether you fat-fingered something or a robot did, and a book you cannot reconcile is a book you cannot trust.

How to get one view of crypto and stocks in one portfolio

The wildly underrated alternative is to type it in yourself. You enter what you own, once, and the software does the maths from there. No password changes hands. Nothing logs in as you. The numbers come from a record you wrote and can read, which means you can hold it up against your real statements and your real wallet and know it is right.

In practice you add each holding, its symbol, how many units you own, what you paid, and which account it lives in. Shares and funds in the taxable account, tokens on the exchange, coins in the cold wallet, and the cash sloshing between all of it. Stocks, ETFs, crypto, options and cash sit in the same book, valued from public market data. Your Bitcoin and your index fund finally appear on the same screen, in the same currency, totalled into one net worth figure you can stand behind.

That is the part the separate apps will never give you, because none of them can see the others. One book can. A number you typed yourself can be checked against the statement and the wallet it came from, which is what lets the whole thing reconcile in the first place.

Cold wallets and exchanges in the same book

The cold wallet deserves its own mention, because it is exactly where the linking crowd falls down. A cold wallet is offline on purpose. There is no feed to subscribe to and no login for a robot to scrape, which is the entire point of moving your coins there. To a linking tracker that wallet is invisible, so the safest assets you own end up being the ones it silently forgets.

Manual entry does not care about any of that. A coin in cold storage is just another line you type, valued from the same public market data as everything else. Whether your Ether is parked on an exchange or sitting on a hardware wallet in a drawer, it lands in the same book and counts toward the same total, priced off the same market data. You get self custody and a complete picture at the same time, rather than having to pick one.

Tax lots and P&L that work across both

This is where keeping one book really pays off. A correct total is the easy part to want. What you are actually after is consistent maths underneath it.

When every asset class lives in the same ledger, the rules apply to all of it the same way. Strata derives your tax lots with FIFO, so the cost basis on the Solana you bought in three goes is tracked with the same honesty as the shares you dollar cost averaged into. Realised P&L updates as you log your sells, crypto and equities alike. Unrealised P&L moves with the live marks. There is no awkward seam where the stock logic stops and the crypto logic begins, because there is one ledger and one set of rules.

Try getting that from two apps and a spreadsheet. The brokerage knows your share basis but has never heard of your wallet. The exchange tracks tokens but not the ones you withdrew to cold storage. The spreadsheet knows whatever you last remembered to type, which was March. Stitching consistent tax lots across all of that by hand, every quarter, is the chore that rots until you stop trusting it. Let the computer do the maths on a book you own, and it stays right.

So, is this you?

Doing it by hand is the move if your money is scattered across a brokerage, an exchange and a wallet, and you are tired of never knowing the real total. It suits people who want self custody and a complete picture at once, and who would take one number they can reconcile over three a robot guessed at.

It is not for everyone. If you want a hands-off feed and you are happy for your cold wallet to go uncounted, go and enjoy a linking tracker with my blessing. Strata is the other path. Every asset class in one book, valued the same way, with tax lots and P&L that agree across all of it. If that sounds like the standard your money deserves, you can build your portfolio with your shares and your coins finally in the same place.