How to track your portfolio without linking your bank

Here is a fun little party trick the finance industry would rather you didn’t examine too closely. To use most portfolio trackers, you hand the actual password to your actual bank to a company you have never met, so their software can log in and pretend to be you. And somehow we have all agreed to call this convenient. Let me gently suggest that it is bananas, and that you can do much better with about twenty minutes and a stubborn streak.

So what is “linking your accounts”, really?

Peel the friendly sticker off the “connect your accounts” button and look at the machine underneath. You give an app the login for your bank or your broker. From then on a robot middleman signs in as you, on a schedule, and copies out everything you own. That is the entire trick. A stranger holds your keys and lets itself in whenever it fancies. Once you say it in plain English, that queasy feeling you get is not paranoia. It is your common sense filing a complaint.

The “free” tracker is the expensive one

Most of these trackers are free, which should make you suspicious rather than delighted. Banking pipelines and pretty dashboards cost real money, so have a little think about how a free product pays its bills. Your tidy, aggregated financial life is a genuinely valuable thing to sell, and you are sitting right next to the till. When you cannot see the price tag, you are usually looking at it in the mirror.

Then there is the password itself, which you cannot un-share. The second you hand it over it lives on somebody else’s servers, guarded by their security budget and their good luck instead of yours, for as long as the connection lasts. You have taken on a risk you can never fully claw back, in exchange for saving yourself a bit of typing.

And the convenient robot breaks constantly

Here is the part nobody puts in the sales pitch: these connections break all the time, quietly. Picture a spreadsheet that updates itself, except a stranger writes the formulas, fat-fingers one every now and then, and never tells you. A broker tweaks a login page or adds a security prompt, and suddenly a position is doubled, or frozen at last week’s value, with nothing flashing red to warn you. You end up logging back in every few weeks just to keep the lights on, and when a number looks wrong you cannot tell whether you slipped or the robot did. A book you cannot reconcile is a book you cannot trust.

The boring method that actually works

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

In practice you add each holding, its symbol, how many you own, what you paid, and which account it lives in, across every pot you keep money in. A taxable account, a pension, an exchange, a cold wallet, the cash sloshing between them. Shares, funds, crypto, options and cash all sit in one book. From that single pile of facts, Strata works out the stuff you would otherwise babysit in a spreadsheet for the rest of your life: live valuation from public market data, FIFO tax lots so your cost basis stays honest, realised profit and loss as you log your sells, and a forecast of the dividends headed your way. You keep the ledger. The maths is the computer’s problem.

“But typing it all in sounds like a nightmare”

I know, I know. This is the bit everyone dreads, and it is almost entirely imaginary. The dread assumes you own four hundred different things. You do not. Most people own a few dozen holdings they built up slowly over years, and entering them is one sitting with a cup of tea, measured in minutes. After that you only add the trades you actually make, which, let’s face it, you wanted a record of anyway.

For that one small chunk of effort you get valuation, tax lots, profit and loss and dividend forecasts that keep updating on their own, forever. Compare that to the linking route, where the first click is cheaper and then you pay in instalments of irritation for the rest of time: the re-logins, the silent breakages, and a password of yours living somewhere you will never get to see.

So, is this you?

Doing it by hand is the move if you would simply rather not hand your bank login to strangers, or if some aggregator has already burnt you by breaking and scrambling your numbers. It suits people who want a book they can reconcile and audit, and who would take a number they trust over a number that magically appeared.

It is not for absolutely everyone, and that is fine. If you genuinely want a hands-off feed that updates while you ignore it, and none of the above keeps you up at night, go and enjoy a linking-based tracker with my blessing. Strata is the other path. You own the ledger, no password ever leaves your hands, and the number you end up staring at is one you can stand behind. If that sounds like the standard your money deserves, you can build your portfolio without linking a single account.