Tracking a Canadian Investment Portfolio

May 17, 2010 by Nick

In this post, we’ll show you how you can setup StockMarketEye to use Canadian Dollars and track your stocks and funds from the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX).

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.