A watch keeps a log. This one records what changed on
Sentryfolio and when, in plain terms. Newest first; entries are added as
work ships, not on a schedule.
When your broker will not say what you paid
Some brokers state what you paid for a holding only after you have
sold it. Until then the statement gives the number of units and a sum
in your account's currency, which is no use for a share priced in
euros or Hong Kong dollars: turning one into the other needs an
exchange rate, and this terminal does not invent those. So the holding
stayed out of your book rather than going in at a made-up figure.
Data and sync now names any holding in that position and asks you
for the one number the statement withholds. You read it off your
broker's own screen, type it once, and the holding appears
immediately. The figure is kept beside your statements rather than in
the ledger, so re-importing that account later cannot quietly undo
it.
A related correction, in the same pass. Where a broker and our
price source spell a market differently, the holding could arrive
without a price at all, which meant no chart and no watching. Hong
Kong was the case in point. Those now line up on arrival.
Practice reaches the rest of the terminal
The practice account used to live on two pages. It now appears
wherever the real book does: Overview, Holdings, the Chart book,
Target watch, Signals, Price history, Income, Reports and Compare.
Each of them carries it in a section of its own with a gold edge, set
below whatever that page says about your actual money.
The fence is the point. A practice pound is never added to a real
total, never counted into a real percentage, and never printed on the
same line as one. Both books are measured with identical arithmetic,
so that something learned in one is worth knowing in the other. That
only holds if you can tell at a glance which of them you are reading.
Practice is also open to every account now, rather than on request.
You choose an opening balance once, between one thousand and one
million pounds. There is still no reset and no topping up.
Writing a note without looking away
The thought that deserves a note almost never arrives on the notes
page. It arrives while you are looking at a chart. So the note box now
opens over whatever you are reading: press N, or use the button beside
Hide my figures, and it appears without taking the page away. It knows
what you were looking at, so the company is already filled in and that
market's moments are offered first. Saving puts you back exactly where
you were.
Notes have also arrived on the charts themselves. A day you wrote
something about a company is marked on its price line, so the thought
sits against the price that prompted it. The mark is a small round pin,
never an arrow, because your purchases and sales are arrows and a note
is not a trade. What you actually wrote is listed under the chart
rather than crowded onto it.
One deliberate omission. Turn on Hide my figures to show the
terminal to somebody and the pins go with the rest. Your notes are the
last thing that should be on screen in front of a visitor.
Notes, and the markets that never sleep
Sentryfolio now takes notes. Write anything you want to come back
to: a company you are watching, a level that matters, a thought you
would rather not lose. Your words are kept exactly as you wrote them.
The useful part is when they come back. A reminder here is not a
clock time but a market moment. At the Tokyo open. Thirty minutes
before New York closes. At the next London open. Each choice shows the
real date and time in your own clock, and the next open always means
the next session that market actually trades, so a bank holiday or a
weekend never has to cross your mind.
Across the top sits a whole day of trading in one picture: six rows
from Sydney round to Toronto, the overnight stretch shaded, a line for
now, and your own reminders marked on the market they belong to. One
glance answers what happens while you are asleep.
Which is rather the point. Set a reminder for the Hong Kong open and
it arrives in the small hours. In the morning it is waiting at the top
of the page with one button to send it again at the next open, and
anything delivered overnight is emailed as well as messaged, because a
message that lands at one in the morning is a message you slept
through.
A note can name a company you hold, or anything on your watchlist,
and it then appears on that company's pages too. Or it can name nothing
at all and simply be a thought. Sentryfolio stores and delivers your
notes. It never reads them and never acts on them.
Drawing on a phone, second attempt
The drawing tools shipped yesterday worked on a phone and were
miserable to use there: one line took six minutes. The fault was not
the size of the buttons but the shape of the mistake. A tap placed a
line instantly, a wrong tap meant catching a one-pixel line to fix
it, and the undo button only appeared once a line was caught. Every
miss cost a whole retry.
So nothing commits on a tap any more. Touch the chart and a gold
line appears under your finger and slides with it; lift, and it
waits. Nudge it a trading day at a time, drag its handle, or type the
exact price, then tap Done to keep it or Cancel to let it go. A stray
tap cannot destroy it. A trend line now runs from one day's close to
another, so its ends slide along the price line itself rather than
landing on a guess, and a level settles on a close or a round number
as you pass. One strip under the chart carries the whole job and
changes with what you are doing; the readout stays in the corner
where a thumb never covers it; and Undo is always there. On the
Chart book, tap Draw on any card to bring the strip to that chart.
Designed in open argument with Claude Design, and tested on the
owner's phone.
Your own lines on the chart
Every price chart in the terminal now takes your own marks. Tap
Level and then the chart, and a white dotted line sits at that
price. Tap Trend, then the start, then the end, and a white dotted
line runs between the two; a switch on each one carries it on to
the right, for the reader who wants to see where a slope would lead.
Tap a line to select it and drag it into place; Delete and Undo do
what they say. Two taps rather than a drag, because most of this
reading happens on a phone, where a dragging finger hides the very
point it is aiming at.
A line drawn on a company follows that company: the same marks
appear on its Chart book card, its Price history page and its
practice chart, and they are yours alone, never shown to another
account. The terminal adds no words to them and never acts on one.
The purple watch lines you may already have set, which the overnight
work does act on, now show on every chart of their company too,
though they are still placed and edited on Price history, where
they always were.
The practice book grows up
Practice holdings now behave like a real book in the places that
teach the most. Every practice holding carries its own chart, drawn
by the same renderer as the real Chart book: the close series, a line
at your average cost, a line at your drop parameter, and markers on
the days you practised buying or selling. And the Allocation page now
measures the practice book alongside the real one, in its own clearly
fenced section: sector mix, geographic mix and concentration, worked
out by exactly the same arithmetic. A practice pound never appears in
a real total. The point of the sandbox is that lessons carry across,
so the measurements have to be the same ones, taken the same way, on
figures that cannot mix.
Acting on a find, and the missing London names
Two additions today, both born from watching a new tester work.
First: practice-account users can now act on a Discovery find where
they see it. Each row on the Discovery page carries a small practice
buy link that opens the practice account with that name already
filled in. The quantity is yours to type, the preview prices the
trade at the newest real close rather than the analysis figure the
screen shows, and every fee is itemised before anything is recorded.
The distinction matters: Discovery's own figures fold dividends back
into history, which is the right mathematics for judging a long
climb and the wrong number to deal at. The sandbox deals at the
dealing price. None of this appears outside the practice circle, and
none of it can touch a real account.
Second: the library is learning its London names. Most of the
exchange's tickers sat in the terminal without a readable company
name attached, which is why a search for a famous British grocer
could come back empty. A paced overnight collector now fills those
names in, biggest names first, a batch each night within the same
polite request budget everything else obeys. The familiar names
arrive over the coming nights.
Search by name, not by symbol
Typing a company's name now finds the company. That ought to have
been true all along, and it was not. The terminal keeps its list of
trading symbols in one place and its list of readable company names
in another, and the search box only ever read the first. For most
well-known companies that entry carried a symbol and no name at all,
so a search for Nike turned up nothing resembling Nike, and a search
for Apple offered a small firm called Pineapple Financial. Both lists
are now read together.
The practice account takes a name as well. Type Nike or type NKE;
either reaches the same company, and the box fills in the symbol
afterwards so it is to hand next time. Where a name is not clearly
one company, the terminal says so rather than choosing for you. That
restraint matters more here than in the search box, because the
answer goes on to price a trade, and a confident guess at the wrong
company would be worse than an honest shrug. A name the library has
never heard of is refused plainly, rather than hinting that the share
might turn up later.
A place to practise
The terminal now carries a practice account: pretend money, real
prices, and the real costs of dealing. You choose an opening balance
once, between one thousand and one million pounds, and there is no
reset button. Decisions stand, exactly as they do in the world.
Purchases and sales fill at the most recent close the terminal
already holds, each confirmation names the day that close belongs
to, and every charge a real account would levy is itemised before
anything is recorded: stamp duty on UK shares, the currency
conversion fee, the small statutory levies. Dividends arrive on the
real timetable too. Holding a share past its ex-dividend date earns
the payment; the cash lands weeks later, when a real broker would
pay it, and until then it shows as declared and waiting.
None of it touches the real records. Practice money lives in its
own tables, walled off from holdings, reports and the tax pages, and
the wall is tested with the same rigour as everything else here. The
practice book gets the same drop measurements as a real one, plainly
marked as practice wherever they appear, and never a word of advice
in either place. It opens first to a small circle of testers, as
every new part of Sentryfolio does, and will widen from there.
Webull, without the paperwork
Webull hands its customers no spreadsheet, only documents, which
left it the one account here that had to be kept current by hand. It
now keeps itself current instead. New trades find their own way in
and sit alongside everything else, with no file to download and
nothing to upload. The documents still matter, because they carry
dividend detail a connection does not, but the trade diary looks
after itself from here.
There is a second habit worth naming. Some things a broker does
never appear as a trade at all: a company can consolidate its
shares, and a holding of six hundred becomes a holding of three
without a single instruction being given. So the share counts
themselves are now compared. Where the broker's own tally differs
from the one held here, the difference is raised for you to look at
rather than quietly absorbed, and nothing is altered until you say
so.
Show the terminal, not the money
Sometimes the owner of a portfolio wants to show someone the
terminal itself: every page, working on real holdings, without
showing what any of it is worth. A new switch at the foot of the
menu does exactly that. One tap and every money figure on every page
becomes a quiet mark, while company names, quantities, percentages
and market prices stay. The masking happens before the page leaves
the server, so nothing on the borrowed screen can reveal a figure,
and downloads follow the screen. Turning the figures back on takes
the account password: the person holding the device cannot undo what
you hid.
Your next export, remembered
Uploading broker files leaves one thing to remember: where the
last file ended. Now the upload page remembers it for you. Each
account shows the date its records run to and the exact date the
next export should start on — the same date, not the day after,
because an export made during a day never contains that day's later
activity. Overlapping files are safe: the same record in two files
is kept once, so an extra export never costs anything but the
download.
Pension accounts, kept apart
Some brokers write the same export file for every account they
offer, so the file alone cannot say whether it belongs to a pension.
The upload now asks. Pick the SIPP choice for a Trading 212 pension
export and its holdings, cash and income keep to their own account:
named separately wherever accounts are named, and left out of the
capital gains arithmetic, where a pension does not belong. A file
that is plainly a pension export filed under the wrong account is
refused with an explanation rather than guessed at.
The drop parameter, yours everywhere
How far below your average buy cost a close must fall before the
drop signal is raised: that figure is the heart of the watch, and it
is now tunable wherever you meet a holding. A portfolio-wide figure
sits with the other watch parameters on Target watch, and a small box
beside every name you own, from Holdings to the Chart book to the
signals log, gives any single stock its own figure; blank hands it
back to the portfolio one. Every chart moves its drop line to match.
A parameter is a measurement you choose, and choosing it is yours
alone.
The Chart book
A new page, sitting just under Holdings: every holding you own,
listed down one page, each above its own price chart with your
average cost, your parameter lines and your actual purchases drawn
on. Order the book A to Z, by distance below your cost, or by size;
show a single account at a time; open any chart out from one year to
everything on record. Charts draw themselves as you reach them, so
the page stays quick however many names you hold. Built gated,
tested by the operator, and released to every user the same day. The
guide's tour now shows it, photographed like everything else from
the working terminal.
Which account holds it
With seven brokers importable, one question kept coming up: which
account is this name actually in? Every page that names a company
now answers it, beside the name, read from your own recorded
purchases. A name you have sold says where it was traded, because a
dividend often lands long after the shares have gone. The signals
log, the income ledger, the reports, search and the import review
queue all carry it; one company held at two accounts names
both.
Every page explains itself
Every page of the terminal now carries a fuller "How this page
works": every column, badge, signal and control named and explained
where you meet it, in a glossary laid out for reading, with larger
type that uses the width of the screen. A term the terminal shows
but never explains is a small unkindness, and there should now be
none left. Found because the operator himself met a badge he could
not place.
The calling card
Share a link to this site and the preview now shows the real
terminal beside the name, drawn from an actual capture of the demo.
A logo tells a stranger nothing; the product can speak for
itself.
A seventh broker, counted by position
eToro statements now import. That broker thinks in positions
rather than orders, so each position becomes its own parcel with its
own cost, and a close is charged against exactly the parcel it
closed. Dividends arrive with their withheld tax; leveraged bets are
recognised for what they are and kept out of the share ledger.
A sixth broker, read from paper
Webull statements now import. That broker offers no spreadsheet
export at all, only PDF documents, so the importer learned to read
them: trade confirmations become the lot-by-lot ledger, monthly
statements supply the dividends and their withheld tax. A document
downloaded twice counts once, and a summary page that holds no
usable records is politely declined.
What the importer refuses to keep
Some broker exports carry card spending, cash-machine withdrawals
and cashback alongside the dealing history. The importer now drops
those rows at the door: a cash machine talks to a card account, never
to a portfolio, and shopping is not investing. Rows of that kind
stored before today have been removed.
Trading 212's new file shape
Trading 212 quietly renamed a column in its export files this
summer, and a file in the new shape was recognised but read as
empty. The reader now understands both shapes; and a recognised
file that yields nothing announces itself plainly instead of
passing in silence.
How long a read
Each journal entry now says up front how many minutes it asks of
you, on the entry and in the index alike. A small courtesy; nothing
else about the journal changed.
The finds, by sector
Discovery's table gained a sector column and a sector filter, and
a strip above it counts your own holdings by sector, fewest first.
One click narrows the overnight finds to the sector you are looking
at. The counts describe your mix; they pass no judgement on it.
Discovery meets your holdings
The overnight hunt used to hide any company you already held. Now
it shows them, marked in place with your share count and money in,
and a filter for only those. Open one and the page states your
position, and its chart draws your buys, sells and cost lines
exactly as Holdings does. Whether the overlap means anything is, as
ever, yours to say.
Sorting that stacks
Every table in the terminal now sorts like a spreadsheet: click a
second column and it breaks ties within the first, numbered arrows
keep the order visible, and a reset button puts things back. For
columns that rarely tie there is Balance the columns, which orders
rows by how they stand across all your sorted columns at once,
without weights or opinion. Leave for a detail page and come back:
the sort and your place on the page are as you left them.
The hunt ranges wider
The overnight hunt now surveys a field several times the size it
began with, with funds and investment trusts in the line-up
alongside companies. Its finds have begun arriving from further
afield accordingly.
Sign out everywhere
A new control on the Data page ends every signed-in session at
once, on every device, including the one that pressed it. For a
lost phone or a borrowed computer, one certain answer.
Holdings, A to Z
The Holdings page now lists everything you hold in one
alphabetical sweep. The old view led with the deepest fall and kept
the rest behind a Show-all button; that order is still one click
away on the Vs cost column, but the page opens like a ledger, not a
leaderboard.
One site, one skin
The new front page's design now dresses every page: the same serif
and mono, the same scarce gold, the same nav and footer from the
story to the small print. Nothing was reworded; everything was
re-tailored.
The front page, rebuilt to the drawing
The homepage was remade from a full design study: serif and mono
type, an instrument roster you can play, questions plainly answered,
and a signed note from the operator. The rules underneath did not
move an inch: real screenshots, no third-party code, no advice,
nothing tracking you.
The front page, rehung
An outside design review was weighed against the house rules; what
survived it shipped. The real terminal now stands beside the headline,
the news wire keeps to its own page, the
longer passages were trimmed, and Invite joined the menu. The
privacy page now answers two blunt
questions: who runs this, and what would happen if it ever stopped.
Links in this logbook also gained their underlines.
The hunt, shown working
Discovery had done its overnight work in silence since the
beginning; the homepage now says so, and the
demo's Discovery
page shows the hunt's findings against ten fictional candidates,
gates, yields and dividend years in the open.
Play with the demo
The terminal opened a public window:
demo.sentryfolio.com is the
real system watching a fictional portfolio, read-only, no sign-up.
Look anywhere; nothing can be changed, and nothing in it is anybody's
actual money.
Private by design, on one page
The privacy story was scattered across three pages; now
one page tells it whole. Written the day
the site also began counting its visitors in aggregate from its own
server log, and says so plainly.
Every table travels
Any table in the terminal now downloads as a CSV or Excel file:
exactly the rows you filtered and sorted, or the full list. Holdings,
income, signals, discoveries, realized outcomes.
The price-integrity hold
When a day's close lands implausibly far from a holding's own
recorded history, the watch now suspends that holding's signals and
asks its owner to look, rather than reporting a fall that may not be
real. Data can lie; the watch now says so instead of repeating it.
Sturdier journal checks
A journal draft that fails the editorial rules is now rewritten and
rechecked before the morning gives up on it. The rules did not move;
the drafting got more patient.
Watch lines
Mark a price level on any chart, with a note to yourself. The
morning report says when a daily close crosses it, once, then stays
quiet until the level genuinely re-arms.
Compare, without a verdict
Two companies side by side: quality, valuation, growth, income.
Figures only. Which is the better investment stays your question.
Portfolio shape
The Allocation page now shows sector mix, geography and
concentration, measured from what you hold. Descriptive only; it
will not tell you what a portfolio ought to look like.
Totals in your currency
The Overview can show the whole book in pounds, dollars, euros and
more, clearly marked as approximate. The exact per-currency figures
stay native and untouched: conversion is a glance, never the ledger.
Five brokers
Interactive Brokers and Revolut statements now import, joining
Charles Stanley, Trading 212 and IG. The first arrived with a
tester's files and was reading them within the week.
The journal's first entry
Notes from the watch began: a short entry most mornings, drawn from
the day's reporting, sourced and checked. This site, the guide and
the news wire opened the same week.