Investments

Connect a brokerage or a retirement account and SageFin shows what you hold, what it is worth, and how that fits into your net worth. It is a picture of your portfolio rather than a trading tool — it reads, and it cannot place an order or move a penny.

Until you have an investment account, Investments starts out hidden from the sidebar, since there is nothing yet to show. Search (⌘K) still finds it, and the first brokerage or retirement account you connect or add brings it back.

What you get

Your holdings — what you own, how much of it, and what the institution says it is worth.

Your allocation — the shape of the portfolio rather than the list, which is the thing worth looking at and the thing hardest to see on a brokerage statement.

Performance against a benchmark, so up eleven percent has something to be up against.

Why the total may not match your brokerage exactly

Almost always one of three things, and none of them mean something is broken.

Prices are as of a moment. SageFin shows the value your institution last reported, with the date it was reported. During a trading day your brokerage is live and this is not.

Some things price badly. Anything without a clean public price — an unusual fund, private holdings, some retirement plans — arrives with whatever the provider chose to say, which may be stale or absent.

Cash inside the account. Brokerages differ about whether uninvested cash is part of the account balance, part of the holdings, or shown separately, and the total moves depending on which.

If the difference is small and stable, it is one of these. If it is large or growing, treat it like any other account and check whether the connection is still working.

Trades do not appear in your spending, and that is deliberate

The question everybody asks eventually: I bought £2,000 of a fund — why is that not in my spending?

Because a buy is not an expense and a dividend is not income the way a paycheque is. Investment activity lives apart from your transactions on purpose: it has a security, a quantity and a price rather than a merchant and a category. Folded into your spending it would wreck every budget, every cash flow figure, and every report that reads them — a month you rebalanced would look like the month you lost your mind.

The consequence is that investment activity does not categorize, does not match rules, cannot be split, and never appears in needs review. That is the intent rather than an omission.

Money moving into the account from your bank is a different matter. That transfer is an ordinary transaction and behaves like one.

When an investment account arrives empty

An account connects, shows a balance, and lists nothing you hold — or lists holdings and no activity.

This is usually the institution rather than SageFin. Not every bank shares every kind of data, and a data provider listing investments for an institution is a claim about what is possible there, not a promise about your account. We have watched a major bank list investment data and deliver none of it.

Reconnecting does not fix that, and it is worth knowing before you spend an evening trying.

Adding something by hand

For anything that cannot be connected — a pension that does not link, a holding at a broker with no provider support — you can add it yourself. It counts in your allocation and your net worth, and like any account you keep yourself it changes when you change it.

What is not here yet

Gains and losses, tax lots and cost-basis reporting. Cost basis is stored where a provider sends it, but the analysis built on it is not built. If you need to answer what would I owe if I sold this, SageFin cannot tell you today.

Better to know that now than to go looking for it.