Holdings & Investments

The Holdings tab inside Net Worth is where you record manual investments - individual stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds - along with the registered accounts that hold them. Every holding contributes to your net worth and to the historical chart, so changes in the market are reflected over time.

Manual holdings are the right choice when your brokerage isn't connected to Cadence, when you prefer not to link an account, or when you want a simplified summary instead of every individual lot.

Follow these steps to add a holding:

1. Open the Net Worth page and switch to the Holdings tab.
2. Tap “Add Holding”.
3. Choose the holding type, such as stock, ETF, or mutual fund.
4. Search for the symbol, such as VFV, XEQT, or AAPL, and pick it from the autocomplete results.
5. Enter the number of shares you own.
6. Enter your average price per share (your cost basis).
7. Choose the holding's currency if it differs from your account default.
8. Save the holding.

Cadence pulls live quotes for manual holdings and refreshes them about every five minutes, so the displayed value is your share count multiplied by the current price, converted to your currency. Your average price isn't the displayed value - it's the cost basis Cadence uses to work out gain or loss. The one exception is a GIC-type holding, which has no ticker to price and so uses the value you recorded.

Cadence supports the Canadian registered account types most people use day to day, including TFSA, RRSP, and FHSA. These exist as separate financial-account types you track by balance - they are not a label on individual holdings. A holding has no account or wrapper field, so it isn't tagged with the registered account that holds it.

If you want 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 of contributions, growth, and withdrawals happens outside Cadence, but tracking each registered account separately makes it easier to plan around contribution room and to reason about which accounts to draw on first.

When you buy or sell, you have two options for keeping a manual holding accurate. The first is to recompute the average price as you go: take the total cost across all shares (existing plus new) and divide by the new total share count. The second is to replace the holding with a current snapshot - simply overwrite the share count and average price with whatever your brokerage statement shows today.

The snapshot approach is faster and is usually fine if you don't need exact gain/loss tracking. The recomputed-average approach is better if you want your numbers in Cadence to match your tax paperwork at year end.

If your brokerage supports a connection through Synced Accounts, linking it is usually the lowest-effort path. Synced investment accounts pull positions and prices automatically, so you don't need to maintain shares or average price manually.

Manual holdings are the better fit when your broker isn't available for syncing, when you want to keep certain positions private, or when you prefer a simplified summary. You can mix the two: some accounts synced, others recorded manually - net worth combines both seamlessly.