What is SharesGainLossTracker?

SharesGainLossTracker is an app that creates a daily breakdown of percentage gains/losses and close or adjusted close prices for specified shares, typically shares of stocks you have purchased. It can be run as a .NET console app or a .NET WPF app.

How does SharesGainLossTracker work?

SharesGainLossTracker will create an Excel Workbook file containing two Worksheets. Both Worksheets will have a column for each stock specified. One Worksheet will contain the gain/loss percentage and the other will contain the close or adjusted close price for each day.

The gain/loss percentage is calculated by comparing the share purchase price, and the end-of-day close or adjusted close price. The shares you want to track, and the purchase price, should be specified in a CSV file. Shares you want to track can be split-up into different groups resulting in a seperate Excel Workbook for each group.

SharesGainLossTracker uses 3rd party APIs for stocks data, and currently Marketstack.com and Alpha Vantage are supported. They both offer free and paid tiers, and SharesGainLossTracker will work with their free tiers. API calls are rate limited to a certain amount of calls per milliesecond/day.

You will need to sign up to a free (or paid) tier, which will give you a key to access their API. This key needs to be inserted into the appsettings file.

Setup instructions

1. Download the latest version of the console app or WPF app for your Windows PC from Releases, then extract the files from the zip file.

2. Perform the steps in the configuration instructions section.

3. Run the executable file (.exe) extracted from the zip file.

OR

1. Clone the SharesGainLossTracker repository.

2. Open the .NET solution in Visual Studio 2022 (or a compatible alternative).

3. Perform the steps in the configuration instructions section.

4. Set either SharesGainLossTracker.ConsoleApp or SharesGainLossTracker.WpfApp as the startup project.

5. Build the solution and run!

Configuration instructions

Open the appsettings.json file (or appsettings.Development.json if running in development mode) and edit the values:

Setting	Description
OpenOutputFileDirectory	true or false sets whether or not the directory of the output file is opened upon creation.
SuffixDateToOutputFilePath	true or false sets whether or not the date is suffixed to the OutputFilePath.
AppendPurchasePriceToStockNameColumn	true or false sets whether or not the purchase price is appended to the stock name column in the Excel file.
Enabled	Set to true or false to enable/disable API calls and thus Excel file creation.
Model	Marketstack for Marketstack API, or AlphaVantage for Alpha Vantage API.
OutputFilePath	Path where Excel file is created.
OutputFilenamePrefix	The Excel filename will be a date/time stamp. A prefix can be specified.
SymbolsFullPath	Path and filename of the CSV file containing shares and purchase prices to be tracked.
ApiUrl	URL of 3rd party stocks API. Replace <API KEY> with your API key.
ApiDelayPerCallMillieseconds	Delay between API calls to keep within rate limit. One API call per stock.
EndpointReturnsAdjustedClose	true or false sets whether or not the API endpoint returns an adjusted close price.
OrderByDateDescending	true or false sets whether to sort dates in Excel file in ascending or descending order.

Below are example CSV files that should be referenced in appsettings.json against SymbolsFullPath. Delimited values are: Stock symbol, Excel column name, Share purchase price. Note: Stock symbols can differ between Marketstack and Alpha Vantage.

Marketstack:

GOOGL,Alphabet Inc,89.50
AZN.XLON,Astra Zeneca plc,80.43
BP.XLON,B.P. plc,200.95
BAG.XLON,Barr (AG),537.65
CARD.XLON,Card Factory plc,140.19

Alpha Vantage:

GOOGL,Alphabet Inc,89.50
AZN.LON,Astra Zeneca plc,80.43
BP.LON,B.P. plc,200.95
BAG.LON,Barr (AG),537.65
CARD.LON,Card Factory plc,140.19

Log file

Both apps write to a log file detailing the progress of each run. As default, the log file is located in the same directory as the app. Data is written to the same log file for the current month, after which a new log file will be written to. 12 log files are retained before the oldest is deleted.

A 3rd party library (Serilog) is used for logging, and its configuration is located in appsettings.json. This allows for the logs to be customised, e.g. output format and control over when log files are created/deleted.

The format of the output displayed in the console app can be customised by changing the outputTemplate in appsettings.json.

Supporting other 3rd party stocks APIs

Support can be added by writing additional classes that implement the SharesGainLossTracker.Core.Models.IStock interface.