As many of our users will be updating to Lion in the near future and as all newly purchased Mac computers will come with Lion pre-installed, we’ve put together a few tips on using StockMarketEye on Mac OS X Lion.

Features

All of the current features of StockMarketEye are available under Mac OS X Lion.

We do not currently support some of the new Mac OS X Lion features, such as full screen mode, in StockMarketEye. However, we are planning on adding such features in the future, as time permits.

Java Installation

Mac OS X Lion does not come with Java pre-installed, as was the case in all previous versions of Mac OS X.

It will, however, be installed the first time you run StockMarketEye on Mac OS X Lion. Here’s how the installation works.

1. Start StockMarketEye as you normally would (double-click the App in the Applications folder or click on its icon in the Dock).
2. You will then be presented with the following window. Click on the “Install” button to continue.
   
3. Mac OS X will search for the approriate Java version.
   
4. Once found, Mac OS X will download the Java version to your computer.
   
5. It will then install Java.
   
6. After Java has been installed, click on the “OK” button and StockMarketEye will start automatically. If for some reason, StockMarketEye does not start automatically, you can start it yourself as you did in step #1 above.
   

If you have any questions or problems on getting StockMarketEye to run on Mac OS X Lion, don’t hesitate to contact our support team.

Download StockMarketEye for Mac OS X here!

It includes lots of new screenshots and explanations as well as a number of new sections including:

• Introduction to StockMarketEye (for new users)
• Configuring Columns
• Managing your Portfolio’s Cash Balance
• The Portfolio’s Transactions View
• and more…

We’ll be adding more sections in the future. In the mean time, if you have any suggestions for improvements or features you’d like to see better documented, don’t hesitate to contact us.

First Uninstall, Then Install

Short Description: The upgrade process is:

1. Uninstall the old version of StockMarketEye
2. Install the new version

If you see this window, StockMarketEye has found that an old version is still installed on your computer. In order to proceed with the installation of the new version of StockMarketEye, you will have to uninstall the previous version first.

Important #1: Uninstalling the previous version of StockMarketEye will not remove your data. All portfolios and watchlists that you had before will be available after.

Important #2: Make sure that you have quit StockMarketEye, before starting to uninstall it.

You can find uninstallation instructions here or click on the “OK” button in the window to open them in your browser.

Some users have reported that even after uninstalling, StockMarketEye will tell them that they still have a previous version installed. If this happens to you, look in your C:\Program Files folder to see if a StockMarketEye folder is still there. If this folder is still there, you should delete it (#3 in image below).

Once the StockMarketEye folder in C:\Program Files is gone, you can start the installation of the new version of StockMarketEye.

Why Do We Need To Uninstall First?

We know that upgrading to new versions of StockMarketEye has been difficult for some users. We also want all of your users to run the latest-and-greatest version of StockMarketEye so they can take advantage of all the new features.

So we have simplified the upgrade process for future versions of StockMarketEye. When the next version of StockMarketEye is released, you will only need to click 1 button. StockMarketEye will download and install the new version for you without any intervention on your part. However, in order for this new upgrade process to work, the old version of StockMarketEye needs to be manually uninstalled.

Basically, we decided to make the upgrade process a bit more difficult this time, in order to make the process much simpler in the future.

If you have any questions or problems with the upgrade, don’t hesitate to contact our support team. We’d be happy to help work you through the upgrade process.

For some securities, however, StockMarketEye may not have access to recent quote information. Securities such as bonds and preferred stock as well as items such as real estate will not have quote data available. Some mutual funds (such as Canadian mutual funds or some UK mutual funds for example) also do not have quote data available.

You can still include these securities and investments in your StockMarketEye portfolios, however. Here’s how.

Example #1 – Corporate Bond

Example #1: Citigroup Inc issued bond, 5% yield, maturing in 2014.

As our first example, let’s take a corporate bond issued by Citigroup.

The first thing to consider is what ticker symbol you want to use in StockMarketEye to represent this bond in your portfolio. As StockMarketEye does not have access to quote data for this bond, using the Symbol Search will not turn up any symbols. So we need to invent a fake symbol that will represent the bond in our portfolio. For example, in the case of the Citigroup bond above, we might choose CITI2014.

Another option for our example is to use the CUSIP number. In this case we would use 172967CQ2.

You are free to choose any symbol you want, but the key is to choose a symbol that is meaningful to you and one for which StockMarketEye does not already have data. You can verify this by typing your chosen symbol into StockMarketEye’s Symbol Search field. The search results area should be empty.

Now that we have our ticker symbol, we can add it to our portfolio as we would add a normal stock. Click on the “Buy Stock” button in the toolbar to open the “Buy or short-sell a stock” window. Then enter the choosen ticker symbol and other pertinent data.

In the image above, the important fields are highlighted with a red arrow. You can see that we set the “Number of Shares” to be 5, meaning that we are purchasing 5, $1000 par bonds. The “Price” field we set to the purchase price, which in our example is $986.05 per $1000 par bond. Click OK to add the bond to your portfolio.

StockMarketEye warns us that it does not have access to any data for the symbol, CITI2014. We can safely click OK as we will enter the current price quote ourselves.

Your portfolio will now look something like this. We’ve also added a holding of Citigroup stock to our portfolio.

You’ll notice that the “Name” column is empty for our bond. We can add our own name by editing this field. To do this, with the CITI2014 item selected as it is in the image above, click in its “Name” cell.

Then type the name you want to give this item. In our example, we’ve choosen “Citigroup 5% 2014″.

When you’re done typing the name you want, press Return to have StockMarketEye remember it.

Now let’s say that the price of the bond changes. StockMarketEye won’t be able to update the price automatically, but we can edit it manually.

As we did to change the “Name” cell, we can edit the “Last” cell to change the current price and compute the value of our holding. Select the CITI2014 line and click in its “Last” cell, then type the new price. In our example, let’s say the new price is now $989.50.

As you can see in the next image, the prices have updated to reflect the new value of our bond holding.

Update the “Last” cell like this any time you want to bring your bond holding up-to-date.

Example #2 – Canadian Mutual Fund

The same principles from our bond example above can be applied to other security types. Let’s take the Canadian mutual fund, Fidelity Canadian Disciplined Equity Fund. This fund has a “Fund Code” of FID224 so let’s use that as our ticker symbol.

In the “Price” field we entered the NAV.

Now we’ll edit the “Name” cell and set a new “Last” value for the fund.

You can update the “Last” cell value every day or whenever you want to bring your portfolio up-to-date with the lastest prices.

Tracking your RRSP

StockMarketEye can track an unlimited number of portfolios. As a help to get you started, StockMarketEye will automatically create a portfolio called “My 401K” for you. You can delete this portfolio or create others, as needed. For this post, however, we’ll simply rename this portfolio from, “My 401K”, to “My RRSP” to represent your Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP), the Canadian equivalent of the US 401K. If you don’t have an RRSP, you can rename it to something else, such as the name of your brokerage.

To rename this portfolio, double-click on the “My 401K” Portfolio in the list on the left-hand side of the StockMarketEye window. You can also just select the “My 401K” Portfolio there and go into the menu called “Portfolio” and choose Settings. This will open the “Portfolio Settings” window as shown here.

Now change the “Name” field from “My 401K” to “My RRSP”. You can also write something in the description if you are so inclined.

You should also change the currency of this portfolio from US Dollars to Canadian Dollars. Select the Currency tab in the “Portfolio Settings” window. Then scroll up and select Canadian Dollar (CAD) in the list.

Click OK for the changes to take effect.

Default StockMarketEye Currency Settings

By default, StockMarketEye creates portfolios with US Dollars as the currency. You can change this as well as the currency used in the Portfolio Totals view to use Canadian Dollars.

Open the StockMarketEye “Preferences” window. On a Mac you can do this by going to the “StockMarketEye” menu and choose “Preferences…”. On Windows or Linux, go to the File menu and choose “Preferences…”.

In the “General” tab, you’ll see the “Currency Settings” block. There are 2 settings here you can change. The first is the “Currency for ‘Portfolio Totals’ view”. Click on the button labeled “Choose…” and the “Select Currency” window will open.

As you did in the Portfolio Settings dialog, scroll up in the list and select Canadian Dollar (CAD), then click OK. Now do the same for the “Default initial currency for Portfolios”. Finally click OK in the Preferences window for the settings to take effect.

If you now click on the “Portfolios” item in the list on the left-hand side of the StockMarketEye window, you’ll see the Portfolio Totals view. Note that it now uses Canadian Dollars (C$), rather than US Dollars ($).

Finding Canadian Stock Ticker Symbols

You can use StockMarketEye’s built-in Symbol Search technology to find the ticker symbols of the stocks you want to track from the Toronto Exchange (TSX). Just click in the “Symbol Search” field in the upper right corner of the StockMarketEye window and start typing the name or symbol of the stock you want to add. The search results are displayed just below the search field. You can double click on one of the search results to start adding it to your Portfolio.

In StockMarketEye, ticker symbols of stocks that trade on the TSX are suffixed with “.TO”. For example, Suncor, whose ticker symbol on the TSX is “SU” in StockMarketEye is “SU.TO”. Canadian Western Bank on the TSX is “CWB” but in StockMarketEye is “CWB.TO”.

Another change to be aware of is that tickers symbols from the TSX that contain a “.” (period) have the period converted into a “-” (dash). For example, Penn West Energy Trust on the TSX is “PWT.UN” but in StockMarketEye is “PWT-UN.TO”.

StockMarketEye also supports the Canadian Venture Exchange (CNDX). Ticker symbols of stocks that trade on the CNDX are suffixed with a “.V” in StockMarketEye. For example, Alange Energy Corp, which on the CNDX trades as “ALE”, is “ALE.V” in StockMarketEye.

You can read more about finding stock ticker symbols in the StockMarketEye User’s Guide.

A Note About Canadian Mutual Funds

StockMarketEye can track Canadian stocks and ETFs from both the TSX and CNDX. StockMarketEye can also track Canadian mutual funds using Google Finance as the data provider. Some example tickers symbols for Canadian mutual funds are: MUTF_CA:RBF266 and MUTF_CA:TDB911.

Try StockMarketEye Now

Get StockMarketEye Now, and start tracking your Canadian investments today!

For example, the symbol LLOY.L is Lloyds Banking Group. We know that this company trades on the London Stock Exchange because the symbol has a “.L” suffix. Because it trades in London, StockMarketEye assigns it the currency, GBP (British Pounds).

The symbol BNP.PA is BNP Paribas. Because of the “.PA” suffix we know that it trades on the Paris Exchange. So StockMarketEye assigns it the currency, EUR (Euro).

Assigning the symbol’s currency based on its exchange suffix works 99% of the time.

But what happens if StockMarketEye gets it wrong? What happens if the currency assigned to a symbol is different from the actual currency in which the stock trades? For example, if a security trades on the London Exchange, but is denominated in USD (US Dollars), how can you change it in StockMarketEye from GBP to USD?

Changing the Currency

We’ll use PHPD.L as our example symbol. PHPD.L is an exchange traded fund (ETF) for physical paladium. It trades on the London Exchange, but is actually denominated in USD rather than GBP.

1. First, we’ll need to add the Currency column to our Portfolios. The easiest way is to open the Preferences and select the Columns tab. Then click on the Prices button.
   
2. You’ll now see the “Configure Portfolio Prices Columns” window as shown below. Select the “Currency” column name in the Available Columns list on the left. Then click on the right-arrow to move it to the Configured Columns list on the right. Now click the OK button to re-configure the columns.
   
3. Close the Preferences window.




4. Now select PHPD.L in your Portfolio.
   




5. Then click in the Currency cell to start editing.
   




6. Delete the “GBP” and enter “USD”, then hit return.
7. You’ll see that StockMarketEye now shows the PHPD.L position in US Dollars, rather than British Pounds.
   

As securities normally trade in the local currency of the exchange, you will probably never need to change its currency in StockMarketEye. But if you’re interested in investing in physical paladium via the PHPD.L ETF, you now know how to set the proper currency in StockMarketEye.

Also Note You should also add the “Exch Rate” column, just as you added the “Currency” column above. Then, if the new currency is the same as the currency of your portfolio, edit the value of this column so it says 1.0. If the new currency is not the same as the currency of your portfolio, you don’t need to change it here as StockMarketEye will update the exchange rate value itself the next time the portfolio updates its quotes.