Add a note facility

Sometimes I would like to be able a note or comment about any given stock that is in my portfolio, much the same as I can with listings on my Sella account. I feel it will be very handy to be able add notes particularly to stocks on my watch list.

I would also appreciate this (and it's something I can't easily hack in with Greasemonkey, unless maybe I try to use DOM storage or something)

One use I'd make of it: when selling/covering only part of a holding, the 'Avg cost' fields change to incorporate profits/losses so far. I can see why it does this, but I don't like it since it makes it hard to see what is going on if you're making frequent trades as the market moves. So I've sometimes ended up noting down in a text file the original 'average cost' (or buy/sell prices from the history). A notes field would be much more convenient.

Just a free-form text field would be fine for me, maybe something that pops up in an overlay div when an icon is clicked - but preferably show the first few characters when it's hidden. If it has to have a maximum length then a few hundred characters or so would be good.

For anyone keen having an approximation of this feature until iPredict implements it, I've extended my previous greasemonkey script to do this (Firefox only).

New version of the script and instructions are available here.

For the technically inclined: this uses the new-ish 'DOM Storage' javascript API to persist the notes text - it ends up in the local browser user profile. So obviously it will not be there if you access from a different machine, unless you're doing something elaborate to sync your browser profiles.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/15/2009 05:07PM by Funfinite.

Funfinite Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I would also appreciate this (and it's something I
> can't easily hack in with Greasemonkey, unless
> maybe I try to use DOM storage or something)
>
> One use I'd make of it: when selling/covering only
> part of a holding, the 'Avg cost' fields change to
> incorporate profits/losses so far. I can see why
> it does this, but I don't like it since it makes
> it hard to see what is going on if you're making
> frequent trades as the market moves. So I've
> sometimes ended up noting down in a text file the
> original 'average cost' (or buy/sell prices from
> the history). A notes field would be much more
> convenient.

This is one of the main areas of use for myself. I recently wanted to reduce my holdings of a stock that I had bought in three or four lots and the average cost was, quite frankly, useless for my purposes. As the stock was showing a loss I needed to know if I had bought any that I could sell at no loss. In a note facility I would have had numbers and prices of each purchase thereby avoiding trolling through about five pages of history to find what I needed.

>
> Just a free-form text field would be fine for me,
> maybe something that pops up in an overlay div
> when an icon is clicked - but preferably show the
> first few characters when it's hidden. If it has
> to have a maximum length then a few hundred
> characters or so would be good.

Agree.