The tour
From export to quiet report
No account linking, no shared passwords, no opinions. Here is the whole journey your numbers take, in plain English.
Step one
Your ledger, kept exact
Everything starts with a file your broker already gives you: the export or statement sitting behind a button you've probably never pressed. Drop it into the terminal and Sentryfolio reads the numbers. Every purchase, every sale, every dividend, in the currency they actually happened. There is a short guide for each broker: Charles Stanley Direct, Trading 212, IG, Interactive Brokers and Revolut.
Each purchase becomes its own lot, kept at the exact price you paid, forever. Sales are matched against your oldest purchases first. First-in, first-out is Sentryfolio's own bookkeeping convention, chosen because it keeps every figure exact and traceable. It is not a tax calculation: UK capital gains rules match shares differently (same-day, then thirty-day, then a pooled average cost), so anyone working out tax should speak to an accountant. Stock splits and reinvested dividends are handled without ever rewriting what you originally paid, and re-uploading a file is always safe: the importer recognises everything it has seen before.
Hold the same company at two brokers? They stay two positions: legally separate, separately costed, never blurred together. Hold dollars and pounds? They stay dollars and pounds: Sentryfolio never converts one currency into another, because an exchange rate would quietly turn your broker's facts into somebody's estimate.
From this ledger comes the one number the watch cares about most: your average cost for each holding. That is what the shares you still own truly cost you, recalculated automatically every time you buy or sell.
Step two
Your numbers, not ours
The drop parameter
"Tell me when a holding closes this far below my average cost." Deeper steps wait beneath the first, so a continuing fall is measured in orderly rungs rather than a single shout.
The target band
"Tell me when a price gets this close to the analysts' average target, or passes it." Their estimate, not guidance; the watch just measures the distance.
The gain marker
"Tell me when a purchase is this far above what I paid." And, separately, when a winner has given back a chosen slice of its 52-week high.
Every one of these is a number you choose and can change at any time. The watch measures with them from that night. And every signal fires once, then locks until the price genuinely moves away and returns. The mathematics of a calm phone.
Step three
The night shift
While you sleep, two things happen. Every holding's closing price is gathered and measured against your parameters, in the stock's own currency, against your own baselines. And the discovery engine continues its patient walk through a global universe of thousands of dividend-paying stocks, funds and ETFs, putting each through four objective gates: has the price climbed steadily for years? Is the climb meaningful? Has the dividend been paid without a break? Is the yield sensible: high enough to matter, not so high it smells of trouble?
Candidates that pass appear in the terminal with their numbers laid bare. Never as suggestions, only as findings you can inspect, track or dismiss.
Step four
One quiet report
Each morning a single digest arrives: a heartbeat line confirming the watch ran, then whatever parameters were met. Grouped, brief, each stock linking straight to its chart. On a quiet day it says so, in one line. That's not filler: the digest that always arrives is the proof the system is alive. If it ever goes missing, that silence is itself the alarm.
Everything deeper waits in the terminal for whenever you want to look: decades of price history with your purchases marked on it, income month by month, worth over time, what every sale banked.
Plain dealing
What it doesn't do
Prices are end-of-day closes, not a live feed: the watch reports each morning, not each minute. There is no app store listing; the terminal installs to your phone from the browser. Five brokers are supported today, and a new one joins when someone brings its files. And it will never tell you what to buy or sell, including the days you might quite like it to. If any of that is a dealbreaker, better to know now.
See it standing watch
The guide covers every page and signal in ten minutes; the invitation form is read personally.