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.
Dividend records with every payment
Some companies' dividend records were missing a payment or two, so
their twelve-month dividend, their yield and their totals by year read
lower than they should. A missing payment could even look like a cut.
A record now keeps every payment its own price history shows, and a
payment whose ex-dividend day has passed is looked for until it
arrives. Records already short are being completed over the coming
days, so yields across the terminal will move up where a payment had
been left out. Where no source the terminal uses holds a payment, the
record stays as it is: nothing is ever filled in by guesswork.
Closing prices that have settled
In the first minutes after a market closes, the day's final price
is not yet known: the closing auction is still being counted. A price
read in those minutes could be kept as the day's close, a little off
and with too little volume, and stay on a chart. A day's price now
counts as its close only once it has settled, on every exchange. For
a market that closes shortly before the morning message, its close
arrives with the next check that day.
Charts of shares listed in New York and Sydney now gain each
trading day's close the same night, where many waited several days.
And a chart refreshed in full no longer loses a recent close that had
not yet reached the full history.
A share sold in full stays sold
Some pages and messages went on speaking of shares that had been
sold in full. Several separate faults lay behind it, and each is
now put right.
A watch line drawn on a chart while you held a share was still
measured after you had sold every share of it, and its signal still
arrived. Such a line now rests. It is not measured and nothing is
sent about it, but it stays on its chart, drawn faint, with the date
of the sale and a Keep watching button for a line you still want
measured. The morning message mentions it once. If you hold the
share again, the line wakes by itself. Lines on shares you have
never held, and lines drawn on the day of a sale or after it, carry
on as before. Each line is also measured once against each day's
closing price, and a signal gives that close's own date. Until now a
check later in the day could measure an older price under that
day's date.
IG's transaction history lists every deal, while its trade
history is a separate export that can stop earlier. A sale or
purchase found only in the transaction history is now read as well,
so a holding sold after your newest trade history file closes as it
should. Such a deal carries the day IG settled it, usually one or
two working days after the deal itself, until a trade history file that covers it
gives it its own day. Nothing is counted twice.
Three kinds of Charles Stanley sale were misread. A small sale
whose dealing costs came to more than it brought in was taken for a
purchase. A sale on a day when another broker also sold the same
share was treated as already recorded and left out. And where a
holding began with an opening balance, a sale made after the
valuation that balance came from was allowed for twice, which left a
sold share open. Each is now read as the sale it was. When a
valuation no longer lists a holding your records still hold there,
the import's notes now say so. The holding is left as it is until a
statement records what happened, since a valuation carries no deals
of its own.
Overview's "In the target band" tile counted shares you no longer
hold, so it could show far more than the Target watch page it opens.
It now counts exactly the rows that page marks. On Signals, and among
the latest signals on Overview, a signal about a share no longer held
shows "(sold)" after its account, and typing "sold" in the Signals
filter lists those rows. The morning note about holdings on hold
leaves out shares no longer held.
Last, some accounts reach your records only through the files you
upload: IG, Charles Stanley statements, the Trading 212 SIPP and
eToro statements. When the newest file from one of them covers
nothing in the last two weeks, Holdings shows a small grey note
beside the account, for example "IG ISA · records to 16 Sep". The
morning message adds the same note to a signal about a holding kept
only in such accounts, with one line at the foot naming them. A sale
made after that date is not in your records yet. Accounts that are
up to date show nothing extra. On Data & sync, "Records run to"
gives the last day your newest file from each such account covers,
and for IG the next export can start a little earlier, as the page
explains.
London and European prices on the day they close
Closing prices for shares listed in London and the rest of Europe
often reached your records only the next day, and with them any
signal those prices met. They are now measured on the evening of the
trading day itself. A second message arrives that evening only when a
signal has been met or a holding put on hold; an evening with nothing
to say stays quiet.
A note written after midnight keeps its own date
During British Summer Time, a note written in the first hour after
midnight was dated the day before. On a share's page its pin sat a
day early on the price chart, and the list of your notes under the
chart gave the earlier date as well. Both now show the UK date the
note was written.
An exported table had the same fault in its file name, so a table
saved just after midnight was named for the previous day. The name
now uses the date on your own device.
A gain set against the cost of the same shares
The figure beside your total value on Overview compares what your
shares are worth with what they cost. Where a broker records what you
paid only in pounds for a share priced in dollars or euros, that
purchase has no cost in the share's own currency: it was left out of
the cost while its shares stayed in the value, so their whole value
read as gain. Each cost is now set against the value of exactly the
same shares. The value still counts every share you hold, and a line
under the tiles names what the comparison leaves out. The line of
totals on Holdings works the same way.
Prices are read more carefully too. The price of one of your own
purchases, or a statement's valuation, stands for a holding only when
it is in the share's own currency and newer than any market close
held, and Holdings then says what it is and gives its date. A date
also appears under any price older than its market's last trading
day. The peak watch takes its high from market closes alone and
starts afresh after a share split. A purchase recorded in a currency
other than the share's is left out of the average cost and named,
as one recorded only in pounds already is. A holding that arrives
with a new broker file is priced on its first morning, where until
now it waited a day.
A holding put on hold is told the day it happens
When a closing price steps so far from the one before it that a
holding's signals are put on hold for you to look at, the message now
says which way it moved, by how much, and gives both prices. Until
today every hold was described as a fall, even when the price had
risen, and the words explaining a step the size of a share split or
consolidation appeared only on Data & sync.
Some markets publish their closing prices after the morning message
has gone. A hold that begins on one of those prices is now told the
same day, in a shorter second message with a title of its own, rather
than the next morning. A day with nothing new to tell still brings no
second message.
Older statements fill in, never overwrite
A Charles Stanley statement sent after a newer one used to rebuild
each holding it covered from that one file. The newer purchases and
sales it did not contain were set aside, and a single undated opening
balance stood in for them. Sending a July statement again after an
October one was enough. An older statement now only fills in what is
missing: everything already on record stays exactly as it is, and
nothing is counted twice.
An opening balance is the shares held before a statement begins,
costed so the holding's total matches the valuation. That cost now
comes only from Charles Stanley's own purchases. Until today a
purchase of the same share at another broker was taken off it as
well, so the opening balance, and the holding's average with it, read
too low. Valuations remain the one file to send in order, newest
last.
When an upload cannot be imported
Until today, a broker file that could not be imported left a
message saying support already had the details. In fact nobody had
been told. Now the operator hears of it at once: the account, the
file's name with its numbers hidden, the broker it looked like and the
kind of fault, never anything from inside the file. The message on
your page says so.
The file also no longer stays among your broker files, where the
next upload from the same broker could stumble over it. It is kept
apart and nothing is deleted. If you had sent a file of the same name
before, that earlier one is put back.
An average cost made only of prices in the share's own currency
Some brokers record what you paid only in pounds, even for a share
priced in dollars or euros. Until today one such purchase switched a
holding's drop, gain and peak signals off altogether. Now the average
cost is worked out from the purchases whose price is known in the
share's own currency, and the signals measure against that.
The shares bought the other way still count in what you hold and in
its value. Holdings marks the average with a small star, the page
listing a holding's purchases shows which ones are left out and why,
and every signal for such a holding says so in its own words. No
exchange rate is used anywhere.
The menu, in six groups
The tabs down the left had grown one at a time, each added at the
foot of the list. They now sit in six groups, ordered by the job: Today
(Overview, Signals, Notes), My portfolio (Holdings, the share chart,
Chart book, Target watch), Income, Find ideas (Income Discovery,
Watchlist, Compare), Review (Allocation, Reports) and Account (Data
& sync). Each group has a small heading; with the menu folded to its
icons, the headings become thin lines between them.
Two tabs now say when they have something for you. Signals shows how
many were raised today, and where a broker is connected to your
account, Data & sync shows a dot on a day when that broker's own share
count differs from your records. The page that draws
one share's full chart is now called Share chart: the page itself is
unchanged.
A price that arrives late is checked too
Now and then a market's closing price reaches your records a day
late. Until today such a price was kept for the charts and never set
against your drop steps, your gain parameter or your watch lines, so a
holding that dipped through a line on that day and was back above it
by the next close went unmentioned.
It is now checked when it arrives, in date order, in exactly the
way any other close is, and the morning message says which day it
was. Older prices filled in only to complete a chart are left as
history: a day is checked only when it is newer than anything already
checked for that holding, so nothing is told twice.
When a US company files a notice about its listing
A US company must tell its regulator when its stock exchange says
it falls short of a rule for staying listed, when the exchange decides
to remove it, and when the company itself chooses to leave or to move
to another exchange. One notice covers all of these, so a holding
that has filed one now carries a small chip on Holdings that says
which it is: leaving its exchange, a delisting notice, or a listing
rule notice.
A company moving to another exchange, one back within its
exchange's rules, or one whose notice says no more than that it
concerns its listing, carries no chip at all. A notice about a
company's warrants or preferred shares is not read as a notice about
its ordinary shares. The holding's own page, and the company's, give
the notice in a sentence with its date and a link to the filing
itself.
A drop is always told, and a gain is told once
A fall below your average cost is now raised every time it meets
one of your steps, however many separate purchases the average is made
of. Until today a holding built from four or more purchases had those
drops written to the Signals log and left out of the morning message.
The ladder itself is unchanged, and still ends at its last step.
A gain is reported once for each purchase. A rise past your gain
parameter could be reported again on later mornings for the same
purchase, as if it were new. It is now said the first time and then
left alone.
Two changes concern a holding whose signals are on hold after a
price that looked wrong. It is named in every morning message for as
long as the hold stands, where before it was said only on the day it
began. And where the step in price is the size of a share split or
consolidation, the hold says so, because resuming is not the cure for
one: the purchase prices have to be put on the new basis first.
Sorting starts with the highest
Click a column heading in any table and the highest figure now
comes to the top, or the newest date. It used to be the lowest. Click
the same heading again to turn it round. Columns of names and symbols
still run A to Z on the first click.
Three things were put right on the way. A cell with nothing in it
stays at the foot of the table whichever way the column is sorted.
Names and symbols that begin with a digit are filed with the other
names, where before they were sorted apart by that number. And Income
Discovery's long list, which paused for a few seconds each time it
was sorted again, now answers at once.
The terminal on a phone, and on a fold phone
Every page of the terminal has been gone through on a phone, from
the narrow cover screen of a fold phone to the same phone opened
flat. A table keeps its name column in view and shows the figures
beside it, and you swipe sideways for the rest. The figure tiles sit
two to a row, the buttons are sized for a thumb, and opening or
shutting a fold phone rearranges the page where it stands.
The charts had the most to gain. On a narrow screen the names of
the lines move off the chart into a row beneath it, each with its
colour and its price, so the line itself is clear. A purchase or a
sale always keeps its arrow, and its words show only where there is
room for them (zoom in and they come back), which tidies a crowded
chart on a big screen too. A finger moving up or down over a chart
now scrolls the page.
Two things that had only ever answered a mouse now answer a finger:
tapping the chart to set the price of a watch line, and
double-tapping to see the whole history again. And a watch line can
no longer be nudged by a passing thumb. On a touch screen it moves
only after you tap it in the list under the chart.
London companies' size, in pounds
A London share is priced in pence, and the size shown on a London
company's page was being read in pence too, so every one of them
looked a hundred times smaller than it is: Diageo showed as £365.1
million rather than £36.5 billion. Company size is now shown in
pounds.
Discovery is now Income Discovery
The overnight hunt for steady dividend payers now has a name that
says what it looks for. Income Discovery finds companies that pay a
dividend, have paid one for at least fifteen years without cutting it,
pay out a sensible share of their profit, and whose price has climbed
steadily for a decade or more.
Only the name has changed. The four gates, the findings, the
Watchlist, and the page's address and your saved sorting all stay
exactly as they were.
A share split no longer looks like a crash
When a company splits its shares, four for one say, each share is
worth a quarter as much overnight while nobody is any poorer. A chart
could show that as a sudden 75% fall. Charts now recognise the shape
of a split and redraw the company's history on the new basis instead,
so the line shows what holders actually experienced.
Hide my figures covers the value chart
With Hide my figures switched on, the portfolio value chart on
Reports is now hidden as well, and says why. Every point on that chart
is what your holdings were worth on a day, so it belongs with the rest
of your money figures while you are showing your screen to someone.
Each dividend counted once
A company's record of past dividends occasionally lists one payment
twice: the same amount on two neighbouring trading days. It shows up
most often for companies whose shares trade in both New York and
Europe, and now and then across a whole family of funds on a single
day. Such a pair is now counted as one payment, dated on the earlier of
the two days.
It mattered most in Discovery. A copy inside the last twelve months
added a whole payment to a yield, and a copy in an earlier year made
that year look larger than the next, so a dividend that was never cut
could fail the unbroken-dividend gate. Identical payments further apart
are left exactly as they are, because those can be real payments.
Each holding's official type, and whether it still trades
The Financial Conduct Authority keeps a register of every instrument
admitted to trading on a UK venue. A holding's page now gives the type
that register records for it, in plain words (ordinary shares, a
depositary receipt, an exchange-traded fund, a REIT), and how many
trading venues the register lists it on.
The same register records the day trading in an instrument ends on
each venue. Where it has ended on every venue that listed a holding, a
small label appears beside the holding and its page gives the date. A
holding still trading somewhere carries no label.
Two registers for companies that answer to two
Some Irish and French companies also report to the US Securities
and Exchange Commission, because their shares trade in New York. Until
now the register check read only their home register. It reads both
now, and a label appears if either records something other than a
company carrying on as normal. The holding's page gives each one's
words in turn, the home register's first.
How Discovery judges a company's payout
Discovery's second test asks whether a company pays out a share of
what it earns that it can keep paying. The market figure it uses is
often missing, and until now a missing figure let a company through.
Where a company reports to the US Securities and Exchange Commission,
its own filed figures for the last twelve months now stand in for it,
and a dividend paid out of a loss on those figures fails the test
outright.
REITs no longer sit this test. They must pay out most of their
income by law and their accounting profit is reduced by depreciation,
so the ratio says nothing about them; funds were already treated the
same way. And where a company's yield includes a payment well above its
usual, Discovery now marks it beside the figure, because that part may
not come again.
The official record, as soon as it is published
The company register says what a company is today. The Gazette, the
United Kingdom's official public record, says what has just happened to
it, and it says so first: a winding-up petition, a meeting of creditors
or the appointment of administrators appears there days or weeks before
the register's own status changes.
Every UK company behind a holding is now looked up there by its
registered number. Where there is an insolvency notice about it from
the past year, the holding's page shows the notice's own words, its
date, and a link to read it in The Gazette. Nothing is reworded,
because the terms of use ask that it is not, and nobody named in a
notice is recorded here.
Most of the time this finds nothing at all, which is the ordinary
answer for a company going about its business.
What a company told its regulator
A company's page now carries the figures the company filed itself,
for companies that report to the US Securities and Exchange
Commission: revenue, profit or loss, earnings a share, dividends a
share, total assets and shareholders' equity, for its most recent
financial year. The page says which year they cover, which filing they
came from and the day it was filed, and gives them in the company's own
currency with nothing converted.
Where a company filed both a dividend and an earnings figure, the
page also gives the one as a percentage of the other. Nothing else is
worked out from them. A company that filed nothing shows nothing, and
the rest fill in over the coming weeks, with the companies people hold
or watch first.
Irish companies join the register check
Later the same day, a third register. Companies registered in
Ireland are now looked up in the Irish company register, by the number
that register gave them. A label appears when it records something
other than a company carrying on as normal, such as liquidation,
examinership, a listing for strike-off or dissolution, and the
holding's own page gives the register's word and the date of the
publication it comes from.
Irish funds are not included, because each is identified through
the Central Bank of Ireland's fund registers, which are not asked. A
fund gets no label either way.
A register answer for American and French companies
Two days ago Holdings began asking the UK company register about
the companies you hold, and a company registered abroad got no answer
at all. Two more registers are now asked. Companies that file with the
US Securities and Exchange Commission, which includes many foreign
companies whose shares trade in the United States, are read from
their own filing record. French companies are looked up in the French
company register.
The American record works differently from the British one. It
keeps no single status to quote, so a label appears for only two
plain facts the filings themselves show: a company that ended its
registration and has filed nothing since, or a recent bankruptcy
notice. Some filings look alarming and are routine. A notice that a
bond has left the exchange, or that a company closed an old
registration when it moved its legal home, is paperwork, and it raises
nothing.
Before anything is shown, the register's own name for the company
must agree with the name held for it here. An answer about a different
company, reached through a ticker that has changed hands, is held
back. Companies registered anywhere else, Germany and the Netherlands
among them, still get no label either way. Nothing you hold is changed
by any of it.
A company's page is one click from wherever you meet it
When a company turns up on Compare or in one of your notes, its name
now opens that company's own page, with its chart and its facts. A
holding the library does not carry, which is true of some UK funds,
opens its price history instead, so no name leads nowhere.
A note written on a company's page also stays about that company
now, even one you neither hold nor watch. Until today the note box
knew only your holdings and your Watchlist, so a thought jotted on a
page like Meta's was quietly filed under nothing in particular. The
guide has a short section on looking a company up.
Every company now has a page of its own
Looking a company up used to end in an awkward place. The search
found it, and then the only thing you could do was add it to your
Watchlist. Reading about a company first and deciding afterwards was
not one of the options.
Search results now open the company itself: its chart, its size,
sector and country, and, if it happens to be something you own, your
own position beside it, taken from your records rather than worked out
again. Watching it is one of the things you can do there, instead of
the price of getting in.
Some companies will open with no chart yet. The library runs to
about thirty thousand names and most of them have never been asked
for, so their price history is still being gathered; the page says so
rather than showing an empty frame, and those blanks are filling in
week by week. Nothing on the page acts. Opening a company sets no
level, arms no alert and deals nothing.
A closing price that arrives late no longer waits for tomorrow
Markets do not all publish their closing prices at the same moment.
One Saturday this month, most London closing prices for the Friday were
not available when the morning figures were gathered. They appeared a
few hours later. Until now they would have sat unclaimed until the
following day, and your holdings, charts and totals would have read a
day behind in the meantime.
They are now collected on the day they appear, and, more importantly,
they are measured against your parameters when they arrive. A price that
crossed a level you had set used to be filed quietly as history if it
turned up late, and history raises nothing. It would have passed without
a word. Now it is checked like any other close.
Nothing about your figures changes on an ordinary day, and no extra
message reaches you unless something has actually met one of your
parameters.
What the official register says about a company you hold
A price feed will keep quoting a company long after the company
itself has stopped. Shares can sit in an account for years with nothing
on the page to say so. Holdings now asks the UK company register
directly, and puts a small label beside any name the register does not
show as active: in administration, in liquidation, dissolved. The
holding's own page carries the full sentence and, where the register
gives one, the date.
The label appears only when there is something to say. A company
trading normally gets nothing, which is most of them, every day. Where
the register has no answer, because the company is registered outside
the United Kingdom or the holding is a fund rather than a company, the
page stays silent rather than guessing.
Nothing you hold is changed by it. No lot is touched, no total moves,
no figure is recalculated. The register is quoted, and the reading of it
is left to you.
London prices on Discovery pages, in pounds
London shares are quoted in pence and shown here in pounds. A
company's Discovery page worked that out with a rule of its own, and it
had the two cases the wrong way round. Most London finds were charted a
hundred times too high, as if 1,843 pence were £1,843, and the few
London funds that are quoted in pounds were charted a hundred times too
low.
Those pages now use the same rule as the rest of the terminal, and so
do Compare and the price lines you draw on a find. A line you had
already drawn keeps the level you chose. It is simply shown on the
corrected scale, and moving it saves it that way from then on.
Setting a holding aside
Some shares stay in an account long after they stop being worth
anything: a company suspended from its market, say, or one wound up with
nothing left for its shareholders. The broker keeps listing them, so they
kept appearing here too, sitting at a loss of one hundred per cent at the
top of the Overview.
Any holding can now be set aside from its lots page. It stays yours,
and nothing about it is deleted. Its purchases, sales and dividends
remain on that page, and your broker files keep them up to date. It is
simply left out of your other pages, your totals and your signals until
you bring it back, with one click, from the same page. Holdings lists
whatever you have set aside beneath its table.
One company, one row, whichever broker holds it
Some brokers never say which security a trade was in. IG names the
company and Webull gives only a symbol, so a holding at either of them
was filed under a name of its own. When the same company was also held
at a broker that does give its ISIN, Holdings showed it twice, one row
for each account. Nothing was counted twice, but one company belongs on
one row.
Such a company can now be joined for good. Before it is, the two rows
must share an ISIN and an exchange line, use the same currency, and have
no account in common, and any prices paid must be in line with the
market on those days. From then on, every import from that broker files
its trades on the one row, which lists every account that holds it.
Two smaller faults were found on the way. An IG upload could read
another broker's file as IG trades, and counted one purchase a second
time; the IG import now leaves other brokers' files alone. And a share
that IG exchanged for another company's share, with no price on either
side, used to stay open for ever. The exchange is now recorded, with its
cost left unknown rather than invented.
When a price counts as the close
Each holding's latest price is meant to be where its market closed.
For a share on a market that was still trading at the time, Frankfurt
and the other German exchanges, Helsinki and Hong Kong among them, the
price kept for that day was sometimes one from part-way through the
session, and it stayed in the record as the day's close. The gap was
usually a fraction of one per cent, and now and then a few per
cent.
A day's price is now kept only once that market's own trading day
has ended, judged by its own calendar of sessions and holidays. A price
already kept for a day that had not finished is replaced by the real
close when it arrives.
Two files, one holding
One broker's files describe each holding in two ways. Its statement
names a share by its SEDOL, a seven-character code used in the UK, and
gives no ISIN. Its valuation gives both. A valuation uploaded on its own
was matched to your holdings by ISIN alone, so a holding a statement had
already added was not recognised: the same shares appeared twice and
were counted twice. When the statement came in alongside it, the two
were reconciled at once, which is why the fault stayed hidden until a
valuation arrived by itself.
The two files are now matched on either code. A holding that had
already been split is put back together the next time that broker's
valuation is uploaded, and every purchase, dividend and note from both
rows stays with the one that remains. Nothing is ever joined on a name
or a symbol, and a split that cannot be settled with certainty is left
for you to look at rather than guessed. Your morning summary now names
any holding that sits on two rows and how many shares are counted twice,
so a fault of this kind is reported rather than found by chance.
New since your last visit, all day
Discovery marks a find that arrived since your last visit with a gold
new chip, but the mark went out too soon. It lasted for a single opening
of the page, so opening a find and coming back cleared it from everything
that had arrived before that day. Choosing New in the Status filter did
not help either: it showed every find not yet tracked, which is nearly
all of them.
A visit now lasts the whole day. Everything that arrived after the
last day you looked stays marked for all of the day you next look,
however often you open the page. The Status filter has its own New since
your last visit choice, the gold count above the table does the same in
one click, and so does a new quick view. The old choice is still there,
under a name that says what it is: Not tracked yet.
Funds listed in the US
The hunt looks at funds as well as companies, and some of the funds it
finds are listed in the US. A UK broker can deal a fund for a retail
investor only when the fund publishes a UK key information document.
Funds listed in the US do not publish one, so an order for one is
refused, however plainly the broker's own list shows it.
On Discovery each of those funds now carries a small US fund label,
and they stay out of view unless you tick Show US-listed funds beside
the other filters. The choice belongs to your account, so it holds on
every device. A fund you have already tracked still shows on your
Watchlist, labelled the same way, and its own page says why.
A fund registered outside the UK raises a tax question too. For a UK
taxpayer, a gain on such a fund is normally a capital gain only if the
fund had reporting status with HMRC for the whole time it was held;
otherwise HMRC normally taxes the gain as income. Sentryfolio now keeps
HMRC's list of reporting funds. The page for a fund listed in the US,
and the list of purchases for any such fund you hold, say whether it is
on that list and since when. Holdings in an ISA or a pension are outside
both taxes.
Room to see the whole table
On a laptop, the terminal's widest tables did not fit. On a
sixteen-inch screen Discovery showed fewer than half of its columns,
and the scrollbar that would have reached the rest sat at the very
bottom of a list thousands of rows long, where nobody would find it.
Holdings and the Watchlist had the same trouble in a smaller way.
The menu down the left can now fold to a slim column of icons. The
button at its top does it, and the terminal remembers the choice on
that device. Every page is still one click away: point at an icon, or
reach it with the keyboard, and its name appears beside it. On smaller
laptop screens the menu starts folded until you choose otherwise. A
menu taller than a short screen now scrolls within itself, so the
bottom of it, Sign out included, is always in reach.
Tables use their width better, too. A heading may take two lines
instead of holding its column open, cells carry less empty space, and
a long company name stops sooner and shows in full when you point at
it. On the screen that prompted this, Holdings and the Watchlist now
fit completely with the menu folded, and Discovery shows all but its
last two columns.
For the rest there are three helpers. A row of column chips above a
wide table switches off the columns you do not need; a switched-off
column stays listed, struck through, so it is never forgotten, and the
choice is remembered for that page. The first column stays in place
while a table scrolls sideways. And as you scroll down a long table,
its headings follow along the top of the screen, with a sideways
scrollbar along the bottom whenever there is more to the right.
Matching a holding by its own number
Every share carries an ISIN, a twelve-character code that belongs to
that one security and to nothing else. When a holding arrived without a
market symbol the terminal could price, the search for one leaned on
the company's name, and a name is a poor guide: two unrelated companies
on opposite sides of the world can share one. The search now starts
from the ISIN. A match found that way is the holding itself rather than
something resembling it, so once its currency and its name agree, it is
used without asking you. A match found only by name is never used on
its own any more. It waits on Data and sync until you confirm it.
Imports are checked the same way. A broker's file carries its own
idea of each holding's symbol, and now and then that idea belongs to
another company, or is written in a form nothing else recognises.
Before a new holding is priced for the first time, its symbol is
compared with its ISIN. Where the symbol does not stand up and the
exact listing does, the exact listing takes its place and your morning
summary says so. A holding that already has a price history is left
alone, and so is any symbol you set yourself.
On Data and sync, a suggested symbol is now always one priced in the
holding's own currency, and the links beside the suggestions go
somewhere useful. Most of them used to open a search that found
nothing. Each now opens the suggested share's own page or, where there
is nothing to suggest yet, a web search for the holding's ISIN.
Discovery is looking at more of London, too. Much of AIM, a good
many smaller Main Market companies and a number of investment trusts
had never been looked at. About three hundred of them join the hunt
over the coming days, and only companies that are actually trading:
one that is suspended or has gone does not appear.
The link to a share's own page on the London Stock Exchange website,
added earlier today, now also sits beside the ticker on Holdings,
Discovery and the Watchlist, and at the top of a holding's list of
purchases.
Checking a London share at the source
A share listed in London now carries a link to its own page on the
London Stock Exchange website. You will find it on Price history, on a
company's page in Discovery, on each chart in the Chart book and in
practice, and beside a suggested symbol on Data and sync. It opens in
a new tab. The terminal reads nothing from that page and keeps nothing
from it: it points you there, and what you see is between you and the
Exchange. Funds that are not traded on the Exchange have no page there,
so they get no link.
A few thinly traded London shares, preference shares among them, had
charts that leapt a hundredfold and back through 2024 and 2025. Their
recorded prices were in pounds on some days and pence on others, and
the chart drew both exactly as they came. A history like that is now
put into one unit before it is drawn or measured. A single hundredfold
step is left as it is, because that can be a genuine share
consolidation, and a real event should never be smoothed away.
The same shares had been named every morning as priced in the wrong
unit, and the cause was upstream. A broker's statement had printed them
in pounds one month and in pence the next, and each import rewrote the
setting to match whichever it had just read. A statement now decides
that setting only for a holding it is adding for the first time, so a
later file cannot quietly undo a correction.
The crowded end of a chart
Every chart labels the lines it draws: your average cost, the drop
and gain parameters you chose, the analysts' mean. Those labels print
inside the plot, hard against the price axis, and the gap kept for them
used to be measured in trading days rather than in pixels. On a wide
screen that came to about seventy pixels of gap against a label about
seventy pixels wide, so the label sat on the end of the very line it
named. The gap is now measured the way the label is, and the last day
on a chart has room to be seen. It is capped at a quarter of the width,
so a phone never loses half its graph to a caption.
A chart also used to end at the last close, which is awkward if you
have drawn a line and asked for it to continue: the line runs out of
chart within days. Price history and the candidate pages now carry four
buttons. Ends today, plus five years, plus ten, plus twenty. Choosing
one runs the date axis forward and says in words which year it
reaches.
Those years hold nothing at all. No figure is put in them, nothing
is estimated, and the terminal predicts nothing: it is an empty
calendar. The only thing that reaches into it is a line you drew
yourself. Hovering a blank day gives you its date and no price, because
reading a level off your own line is your job rather than ours. Where a
line you continued would otherwise climb off the top of the chart, the
price scale opens far enough to keep it in view and no further, so the
real prices are never squashed into a smear along the bottom.
Watch lines got the same attention. They are yours, you mark a
price, and a signal reaches you the morning after a close crosses it.
Several on one company is ordinary, and several close together were
unreadable: at a wide date range the price scale squeezes them into a
band a few pixels tall and they merge into one. Each line now carries a
number, highest price first, and the same number heads that line's row
in the list under the chart. It is the same number on the chart book
and on practice, so a line is recognisable wherever you meet it. Point
at a row, tab to it or tap it, and that line lifts out of the pile
while the rest fade back.
The note you wrote against a watch line has moved off the plot and
into its row, where a whole sentence fits. On the chart it was being
written across the data it was meant to annotate.
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.
When a broker renames a ticker
Brokers sometimes change the symbol a company trades under.
Interactive Brokers records such a change by listing the old symbol and
the new one together in a single field. Sentryfolio already read that
pair as one company. What it did not do was go back for the purchases
filed under the older symbol before the rename was understood, so a
holding could end up recorded in two halves, with some purchases
missing from the total.
A renamed holding is now brought back together on the company's
ISIN, which is the one identifier that does not change. Purchases made
under either symbol are counted once each, and the total matches the
one the statement itself reports. Where a holding had already been
split in two, importing the statement again repairs it.
The same import used to name such a company after the renamed
symbol, which no price feed recognises. It now uses the primary symbol
the broker publishes, so the holding can be priced.
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.