Replies to post #24598 on A.I.M. Users Bulletin Board (AIMUSERS)

[OldAIMGuy]

Hi Clive, Re: Newport Summary AIM account.......

Newport lets me print out a total value of the stocks/funds I have in an account. That shows the value of each component, its associated cash reserve, the total of those two and then totals of each of those columns. So, I can pull off the bottom of the page the total value of the "equity" and the "cash."

In a separate installation of Newport one of the investments is the "summary" from that sheet. Initially I divided the starting Equity value by 10,000 shares to come up with a "net asset value per share" for the entire portfolio's invested side. The CASH total also started at the original cash allocation.

Ongoing, I create a new NAV for the summary by dividing the current total value by the residual shares shown. The starting NAV was $7.27 (it was $72,700/10,000 shares) for my retirement account and is currently $11.01 ($108,368/9841.281 shares), for instance. Starting shares were the 10,000 but that's now down to 9841.281.

Every time one of the components is sold I then convert those sales dollars to shares represented by the NAV of the summary and enter that transaction. So, I might have sold 10 shares of IYE at $130, but that gets entered into the summary program as a trade worth $1300, or $1300/NAV = # of NAV shares sold. In this case it would be 118.074 NAV shares ($1300/$11.01 = 118.074).

The key here with the old Newport is to have a second installation of the program. With your Excel version this would be far easier because you could pull the totals from one or more spreadsheets and summarize them in yet another.

I've probably made this sound far more complicated than it really is for Newport owners. It probably seems silly in today's world to have to make a printed summary so that we have the info to enter into yet another calculation. I've far exceeded the original intent of the simple little program.

I remember being somewhat amazed that the HELP section file (the F1 key for those who've never explored it) of Newport was nearly as large a file as the EXE file! In other words, it took almost as many bytes to describe things than it did to do them! I guess that's true with this description!

Re: Newport's complaint of using one share as the total number and also as the min. trade size........
Yes, Newport if finicky about such things. It already knows it would drive the price toward infinity to make a trade recommendation.

Best regards, Tom