Holdings & Investments

The Holdings tab is where individual stocks, ETFs, funds and coins live. What you get in return is the breakdown, prices, and gain or loss against your cost basis.

Positions arrive there two ways, and the tab shows them together:

Setting up the brokerage connection itself is covered in Synced Investments. The rest of this article is about the positions once they are there.

1. Tap the + button on any page and choose Holding. On an empty Holdings tab there is also an Add Holding button in the middle of the screen, which offers Manual Holding - it is the same form, and it disappears once you have your first holding.
2. Choose the holding type, such as stock, ETF or mutual fund.
3. Search for the symbol - VFV, XEQT, AAPL - and pick it from the autocomplete results.
4. Enter the number of shares you own.
5. Enter your average price per share, which is your cost basis.
6. Choose the holding’s currency if it differs from your default.
7. Save.

Cadence Money pulls live quotes and refreshes them about every five minutes, so the displayed value is your share count multiplied by the current price. A holding in another currency shows its value in that currency, labelled with its code, while your portfolio total, allocation and returns are converted into your primary currency. Turn off Show Original Currencies under Settings → Currencies to see every holding converted instead.

The one exception to live pricing is a GIC-type holding, which has no ticker to price and so uses the value you recorded.

Cadence Money supports the Canadian registered account types most people use day to day. These exist as separate financial-account types you track by balance - they are not a label you put on an individual holding.

A holding you type in has no account or wrapper field, so it is not tagged with the registered account that holds it. A synced position is different: its detail pane carries Account(s) and Institution rows naming exactly where the shares sit, and if you hold the same fund in a TFSA and an RRSP you get one card with both accounts listed on it.

To represent a registered account, add it as its own balance-based account rather than looking for a wrapper option inside a holding. The tax treatment happens outside Cadence Money, but tracking each registered account separately makes it easier to plan around contribution room and to reason about which accounts to draw on first. See Tracking Contribution Room.

This applies to holdings you typed in. A synced position updates itself - there is nothing to reconcile after a trade, because the next sync brings your brokerage’s own share count across.

Two ways to keep a manual holding accurate, and they suit different needs:

• Recompute the average. Take the total cost across all shares, existing plus new, and divide by the new total share count. Better if you want your numbers to match your tax paperwork at year end.
• Replace with a snapshot. Overwrite the share count and average price with whatever your brokerage statement shows today. Faster, and usually fine if you do not need exact gain/loss tracking.

A position that came from your brokerage is split down the middle: your institution owns the figures, and you own the labels.

Read-only, because the bank is the source: the share count, the price, the cost basis, and which account and institution hold it. There are no editable fields for these - the detail pane shows them, but nothing in Cadence Money can change them, and the next sync would overwrite an edit anyway.

Yours to change:

• Rename it. Give a fund a name you actually recognise. Clearing the field, or typing your brokerage’s own name back, removes your override so a future rename by the institution shows through again.
• Change its type. If your brokerage files something as the wrong kind of security, set the type you want and the allocation breakdown follows.
• Favourite it, exactly as you would a manual holding, to pin it near the top.
• Archive it to take it out of the portfolio without losing its history - see Archiving.

A rename or a retype follows the security, so a fund held in three accounts is renamed once, on the one card that represents it.

Beyond the position itself, a synced holding carries a few things a typed-in one cannot:

• A Performance view. The detail pane has a Performance segment beside Details, charting what the position has been worth over time.
• Real daily and 30-day change. These are measured against what the position was recorded at on those days, and they measure the price move - buying more shares does not read as a gain.
• Account(s), Institution and the exchange. The detail pane names every account holding the security, the institution behind it, and the listing venue.
• Synced crypto is priced from a live quote. Brokerages do not price cryptocurrency, so left alone a synced coin would sit at what you paid for it. Cadence Money fetches a current price for those instead.

Positions refresh when you pull to refresh, alongside everything else. There is a short per-brokerage cooldown behind that, so pulling repeatedly will not fetch repeatedly. History only starts from the day you link - your brokerage does not supply the years before it.

Holdings and accounts answer different questions, and neither replaces the other. An account contributes its balance to your net worth. Holdings give you the breakdown, the prices and the gain or loss - and are left out of net worth precisely so the same money is not counted twice.

A brokerage shared on an ordinary Synced Bank connection brings its balance and its transactions, never the securities inside it. To get the positions themselves, link it as a Synced Investments connection, or type the holdings in yourself.