If you’re just starting out in crypto, or already hold multiple cryptocurrencies. You have probably come to realise, that keeping track of your various assets is difficult and time-consuming. It’s especially time-consuming to get an up-to-date portfolio value at any given time. In order to keep track of all your cryptocurrency held in various wallets, accounts and exchanges, then a crypto portfolio is required.
What is a Crypto Portfolio?
A portfolio is simply a collection of the different assets you own. But how do you get a single place for all these assets when they could be in multiple places? We can use a crypto portfolio to keep this record, In addition to this, it will provide you with the total value of all your collective assets. Crypto portfolios are available in a few ways, we are going to cover one which is free, secure and quick to keep updated.
What options are available?
Firstly you could choose to develop a spreadsheet that contains a list of your different cryptocurrencies, the amount you hold and their purchase price. The difficulty you will face is how you keep the value up to date. Some choose to keep a spreadsheet, and that’s fine! It’s certainly an option but it will be time-consuming and error-prone.
Another option is an online portfolio. You could connect to your various wallets, exchanges and accounts which hold your cryptocurrency such as Coinbase and Bittrex for example.
We would strongly consider the security of such portfolios, some of these require you to provide your credentials to pull the asset information. Do your homework and make sure you’re comfortable doing this. Some more advanced exchanges will allow you to set up API tokens for such access with limited permissions. These types of portfolios certainly offer great functionality and some include tax calculations.
In addition to connected crypto portfolios, you should also consider how you will deal with any cold storage you have.
What’s the chosen crypto portfolio?
Our choice of a portfolio is from CoinMarketCap, however, we should note that CoinGecko also offers pretty much the same.
Both portfolios are free, they are simple and easy to use! You’re in total control over these types of portfolios as you’re entering the details of your assets yourself. From a security perspective, we prefer to take the longer route and not expose any credentials or access to the platforms/services in which we hold our assets.
CoinGecko
CoinGecko portfolio essentially offers that same but with a slightly different view. You need to add the coin first with CoinGecko and then how many you have purchased versus with CoinMarketCap you add how many coins you hold upfront. There are some different views available in CoinGecko which provides more detail on each asset holding. We are opting for simple and easy and therefore opting to use the CoinMarketCap portfolio.
CoinMarketCap
The CoinMarkeCap portfolio is easy to view, it also comes with some additional tools such as a line chart for all your assets, a pie chart to show your asset allocation by percentage and also statistics for best and word performing assets for example.
- How to add an asset to your portfolio
– Click the blue ‘+ Add Transaction’ button in the top right
– Select your asset type (coin) from the pop-up menu
– Change the date/time to when you gained the coin (this will give you the price per coin at that time)
– Add the number of coins you gained
– Add the fee or a note as you, please
– Click the blue ‘Add Transaction’ button on the bottom of the pop-up
*You can also just add coins without a price by using a transfer
- Add a further transaction to your asset
– Once you have added your asset (coin) to the portfolio click the ‘+’ to the right of the asset
– In the pop-up, as shown above, you can then buy, sell or transfer to that coin asset
Summary
We appreciate that it may take some time to set up your portfolio for the first time, however, once it’s completed it’s a matter of updating. CoinMarketCap is pretty simple and straightforward, which is why we like it! Not only that the portfolio is free for use and we feel much more secure not connecting to other services or exchanges that hold crypto.
The simplistic manner of this portfolio will not suit everyone, there are a number of portfolios available for use and it’s likely to come down to personal choice at the end of the day.
We have mentioned security a couple of times in this post, and we can’t stress enough that you do need to take responsibility for the security of your crypto yourself to a degree. Keep an eye out for further posts in which we will cover security aspects in more detail.
