Most investors hold all of their stocks in a single brokerage account, making it easy to see their overall performance at a glance. Unfortunately, many crypto traders and investors have their holdings spread across different wallets and exchanges. As a result, it’s hard to track everything in one place without a dedicated portfolio tracker.
Let’s examine why you should consider using a portfolio tracker and why you may want to consider ZenLedger Labs.
Crypto portfolio trackers make it easy to understand your holdings at a glance without signing into multiple accounts. Here are some of our favorite options.
What is a Crypto Portfolio Tracker?
Crypto portfolio trackers display and analyze your holdings in one place, eliminating the need to sign into different accounts.
Many crypto traders and investors use spreadsheets to track their portfolios. Using Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, you can track your portfolio and generate custom reports. In addition, Google App Scripts and Excel’s Data tab make it possible to incorporate data from third-party APIs, such as CoinMarketCap, and access a wealth of information.
Of course, most people don’t want to deal with the headache of building and maintaining spreadsheets. You need to manually enter the transaction details and cost basis for each transaction and adjust the totals for gas or other transaction fees. These tasks can quickly overwhelm those placing tens or hundreds of monthly trades.
Fortunately, several web-based and mobile applications make tracking your holdings across different wallets and exchanges easy. Using crypto exchange APIs, they can automatically aggregate your holdings, compute the cost basis, and provide real-time insights into your portfolio without manually inputting any data.
The most important things to look for include:
- Integrations โ The best portfolio trackers automatically aggregate transactions across your wallets and exchanges, so you don’t have to manually input transactions. Integrations are essential for those using less popular exchanges or wallets and anyone using DeFi or yield farming platforms.
- Security โ Crypto transactions are immutable and almost impossible to reverse. As a result, the best portfolio trackers implement top-tier protection to safeguard your data. These security measures typically include SSL connections to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks, as well as read-only access to your exchange APIs.
- Multi-Asset โ The best portfolio trackers support a variety of crypto assets, including DeFi, NFTs, and altcoins. After all, many crypto enthusiasts actively trade cryptocurrencies while also holding NFTs. Keeping these assets in the same platform makes it easier to see their real-time performance.
Why You Should Track Your Portfolio
Most successful crypto traders and investors track their holdings over time. While stocks and bonds make great buy-and-hold investments, crypto assets are notoriously volatile and have unique risks. For instance, an error in a smart contract could cause a cryptocurrency to lose most of its value in just minutes, or a media mention could send prices soaring.
In addition to monitoring for opportunities and risks, aggregating your transactions makes it much easier to see when you have too many eggs in one basket. For example, if your asset allocation drifts too far from your target, you can identify rebalancing opportunities and ensure that your overall portfolio meets your requirements and objectives.
Finally, itโs easy to forget about crypto assets when they spread across multiple locations. For instance, a long-term investor might have ETH holdings in a long-term wallet that they could use to pay gas fees. Keeping track of these assets may be especially important since purchasing new ETH may involve realizing a capital gain on another crypto asset during the exchange.
Introducing ZenLedger Labs
At ZenLedger, we have a lot of experience connecting to different crypto wallets and exchanges to collect tax data and build reports. So recently, we decided to expand upon these capabilities and launch a crypto portfolio tracker called ZenLedger Labs. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to understand your holdings and make decisions.
Some of the platform’s features include:
- Watchlists โ View real-time statistics and performance data for the assets you care about most. For example, you can quickly sort by 24-hour price change, volume, market capitalization, or other factors to identify the best assets.
- Discovery โ Discover, sort, and analyze crypto assets, including DeFi, governance tokens, infrastructure tokens, NFTs, privacy coins, and stablecoins. In particular, you can sort by price change or volume to find opportunities.
- Research (Coming Soon) โ Customize and analyze simulated research portfolios to test new strategies and identify promising ones. You can also track performance across multiple portfolio mixes or develop alternate scenarios to see how trades play out. Note: This feature is still in development and will launch soon.
ZenLedger Labs is free to anyone, regardless of whether you use our tax solution. But, of course, our comprehensive tax suite helps you go a step further and prepare your taxes each year. So, you can do everything from managing your crypto holdings to testing new strategies to optimizing your tax exposure โ all from the same platform.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are portfolio trackers safe?
Most crypto portfolio trackers require read-only API access, meaning they cannot make trades or transfers. In addition, most crypto portfolio trackers use SSL connections, encrypted database storage, and other techniques to safeguard your data.
ZenLedger Labs uses the same security best practices as our tax solution, ensuring your data is always safe.
Are there portfolio tracking templates?
There are many different crypto portfolio tracking templates for Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. While you can easily copy these for your own use, you may need to sign up for API access from CoinMarketCap or another provider to access real-time data.
However, ZenLedger Labs makes it much easier to aggregate transactions and access data without manually inputting transactions.
The Bottom Line
Crypto portfolio trackers can help you organize your holdings in one place, eliminating the need to sign into multiple accounts. While many people use spreadsheets, web and mobile applications make it easy to aggregate transactions automatically without doing everything by hand โ including the free ZenLedger Labs.
If you trade cryptocurrencies, ZenLedger can aggregate transactions across wallets and exchanges, compute your capital gain or loss, and generate the tax forms you need each year. That way, you don’t have to worry about over or underpaying taxes. And instead, you can focus on optimizing your strategies and profitability.
