Introduction
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This is Ken Leoni VP of Marketing at Stock Rover and this video we will focus on Stock Rover’s Brokerage Connect
What is Brokerage Connect?
Stock Rover’s “Brokerage Connect” provides an investor with a read-only data feed of their portfolio holdings. The holdings can include portfolios from multiple accounts within a brokerage and from multiple brokerages. When you connect your Stock Rover account to your brokerage accounts, details for each portfolio are delivered to Stock Rover nightly.
The Brokerage Connect feature means you don’t need to constantly update Stock Rover with changes to your portfolios. In addition to being updated nightly, an update for any brokerage can be initiated by your request from within Stock Rover whenever you are logged in.
With Brokerage Connect you decide which brokerages and accounts within the brokerages you want to bring over. All Stock Rover subscribers can connect a brokerage account to Stock Rover, even free users can link to two different brokerages. You can check out the details here for Stock Rover subscription plan brokerage limitations.
Please note that for Interactive Brokers, Stock Rover has a separate linking procedure. The linking is done via a Stock Rover feed request to Interactive Brokers. The details can be found here on the web site.
Safe and Secure
A quick note about security:
Stock Rover connects to your brokerage firm(s) via Yodlee, a trusted cloud-based account aggregator. Stock Rover never sees your account credentials and has no access to brokerage accounts.
We value security and respect your privacy so we have partnered with the most trusted data aggregation provider. Yodlee handles billions of transactions for millions of users and they have our trust as well. Their security policies are supervised by banking agencies and they comply with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) preventing the disclosure of personally identifiable information.
Only Yodlee interacts with your account credentials and institutions–Stock Rover never handles that most sensitive information. We still treat the contents of your portfolio as highly sensitive information and never share these details. Within our company multiple firewalls and encryption layers prevent unauthorized access.
How does it work?
When you connect your Stock Rover account to your brokerage accounts, Stock Rover will gather all the details on the portfolios you’ve chosen to track.
Any changes to portfolios are reflected in Stock Rover via a nightly update. Portfolios can also be updated at any time from within Stock Rover with as simple click of the mouse. Simply go to Brokerage Connect, select your portfolio, click on the gear next to it, and “Refresh”.
All users, including free users have access to Portfolio Performance in the Stock Rover Dashboard. I have selected two portfolios. In the Dashboard you can see – Dividend Adjusted Return, Value Over Time (notice you can select the time period), Portfolio Performance, (again you can select the time period), Current Holdings, and Future Dividend Income.
Paid subscribers have access to Portfolios in the Navigation Panel. It is here where you can research a specific ticker or set of ticklers using the Table, the Chart, and the Insight Panel Layouts.
Premium and Premium Plus subscribers can take advantage of Portfolio tools where you can:
- Compute future dividend income
- Perform Portfolio Analytics
- Rebalance your Portfolios
- Perform Correlation Analysis
You can also receive automated emails of Portfolio Performance.
How Do I Connect
To connect your Stock Rover account to your brokerage account or accounts, select “ Brokerage Connect” in the left-hand grey selector menu under Portfolio Tools. You can also right-click any portfolio and select “Manage Brokerage Connection”.
Let’s go to Brokerage Connect and add and account For major brokerage houses, we recommend using the links provided on the Yodlee search screen. For anything not covered in this list, simply use the search box, I’ll type in “wealth” and search. Follow the prompts to enter your account login information and once the connection has been verified, you will see the Brokerage Connections panel in Stock Rover with your portfolios from the linked account loaded.
Here we see an example of a brokerage account connection with three portfolios. We can click on the gear icon to reveal menu options, such as ‘Refresh.’ As you hover over any individual portfolios, you’ll see another menu, these options pertain to that individual portfolio.
A quick note. If the brokerage requires multi-factor authentication users will have to use the “Edit Credentials” option each time they sync. When Yodlee is unable to get updates or the brokerage is too slow we’ll show an exclamation icon next to Brokerage Connect instead of the green check mark to alert about the issue.
Linking
Let’s talk about the concept of linking. By default, the portfolios in your connected brokerage accounts will be linked to a Stock Rover portfolio with the legal name of the portfolio as it appears in your brokerage account. Keep in mind the Stock Rover portfolio names can be renamed.
Linking is basically the establishing of a connection “the link” if you will between your portfolio in your brokerage account and a specific Stock Rover portfolio. In its simplest form, we are mapping brokerage portfolios with Stock Rover portfolios.
One reason you may want to change the link is in the instance where you would like to establish a precise history in in your Stock Rover portfolio. You would populate a new created portfolio with historical detail. This page describes a number of ways where you can create your portfolio from scratch.
You would populate a newly created portfolio with historical details and then change the brokerage link to update to the newly created Stock Rover portfolio.
I’ve already created a one with more precise history. I’ll change the portfolio link to “IRA with precise history”.
First Time Connection
Let’s talk a little bit about what happens when you first connect to brokerage. When a connection is first established, the brokerage returns the positions as of the moment you connected, there is no buy/sell history. Here is a link that explains this concept in a bit more detail.
For example, if you have been dollar cost averaging, when you first connect Stock Rover to your brokerage, the positions for each holding will usually come over with a quantity for each and an actual buy price. As the buy date isn’t known the buy date will be the date you connected to brokerage. In this instance November the 9th. Of course, going forward any changes in your brokerage will come over to Stock Rover.
If the cost per share isn’t provided by brokerage, we use the current price and you then can make a one-time correction. If you’d like to make manual changes to the portfolio. Simply right click on the portfolio, go to “Update Portfolio”, expand and you can edit the quantity and cost per share. For more information detail on updating a Brokerage Connected portfolio please see this link.
Conclusion
Stock Rover’s Brokerage Connect allows investors to quickly and easily connect to multiple brokerage accounts and synchronize changes from Brokerage accounts into Stock Rover Portfolios. This not only ensures that holding changes are automated and accurately tracked, but it also saves investors and enormous amount of time.
We also allow a great deal of flexibility in terms of how portfolios are initially populated and then later update with Stock Rover.
We hope you found this video to be useful and informative. Thank you for your time.
