What to track beyond the total
The headline number hides almost everything useful. The metrics that change decisions are:
- Cost basis — what you actually paid, so you know real profit, not paper feelings.
- Allocation — what percentage sits in each asset, which reveals concentration risk.
- Realised vs unrealised P&L — booked gains versus paper gains, which behave very differently.
Why spreadsheets stop scaling
A spreadsheet is a fine place to start, and painful to keep past a few coins. Prices go stale the moment you stop updating them, there's no live P&L, and a single fat-fingered cell quietly corrupts your numbers.
Once you hold more than a handful of assets, manual tracking costs more attention than it returns — and the errors creep in exactly when the market is moving and you're least careful.
Turning tracking into decisions
Tracking is only valuable if it changes what you do. Review allocation drift and trim positions that have quietly become too large. Watch concentration before the market reminds you of it.
Best of all, connect tracking to a trade journal so your holdings and your trade behaviour live in one place — then you can see whether the way you trade is actually building the portfolio you want.