4 Ways to Track Your Bitcoin Investments

With the rise of cryptocurrencies comes the need to track your new investments. Here are several tools to manage your bitcoin investments and other digital currencies.

Some Bitcoin and cryptocurrency enthusiasts advocate for moving most–if not all–of your financial transactions to this new type of currency. Others, though, see cryptocurrency as more of an investment. As Rob points out in this Forbes article, the truth may be something different entirely.

The bottom line is that you need to be careful with this new, volatile form of pseudo-currency. But that doesn’t mean you can’t dabble, if you can afford to potentially lose money on this investment.

As with all investments, though, it’s important to keep an eye on this one. And you can do that now more easily than ever with a vcariety of investment-tracking tools specifically for cryptocurrencies–and one that adds your cryptocurrencies to your other investment tracking.

If you’re looking to continue investing in cryptocurrencies in 2018, check out this list of ways to keep track of that investment.

1. Altpocket

This cryptocurrency tracking app works when you add your API keys from your various cryptocurrency wallets. Then it imports your transactions, much like our favorite budgeting apps do with your general bank transactions. Altpocket boasts a sleek design that is easier to understand than many other altcoin and bitcoin tracking apps. You can also decide which display currency to use to value your current altcoin portfolio.

2. CoinTracking

This website isn’t as pretty as Altpocket, but it does offer a lot of functionality. On the dashboard, you can see the total value of all of your coins, all your trades, and the current bitcoin price. You can also see your portfolio broken down by specific altcoin and bitcoin types, as well as the platforms you’re using for most of your trades. The tool also offers tax return documents, which can ease the headache of altcoin investing at tax time. You can choose to enter your coins and trades manually, to upload them from various coin exchanges, or to use the automatic API importer.

3. Blockfolio

This is another sleek-looking app created to help altcoin investors track various types of coins and trades on various exchanges. It performs basic functions like tracking your current investments and creating charts from that information. But it also gives you push notifications when prices cross certain thresholds, and gives you the latest bitcoin and altcoin news stories on its specialized news reader.

All in One Tracking with Your Other Investments

As you can see, the above three options are only for tracking bitcoin or other altcoin investments. So what if you want to see this piece of your investment portfolio as just part of the whole? In this case, you need to go with another investment-tracking platform that also gives you access to bitcoin tracking.

From what I can tell, the only well-known investment tracker that does this right now is Mint.com. Personal Capital used to offer linking for Coinbase accounts, but it doesn’t do this any longer. You can, however, manually add your Coinbase balance to your Personal Capital account. This lets you add your altcoin investments to your net worth calculations.

Likewise, there is no official support for Coinbase or other altcoin accounts with Quicken or YNAB. But you can add these investments manually to both platforms.

Mint, on the other hand, does officially offer an API connection with Coinbase accounts. This means it offers only limited tracking for altcoin investments, but it does import the values and transactions automatically.

You should note, though, that Coinbase itself doesn’t recommend this integration with Mint. It says that “any integration that involves API keys creates potential risks for account take-overs.” So be sure you’re comfortable with this potential risk before you add your Coinbase account to Mint.

The bottom line here is that the complexity and volatility of cryptocurrencies makes them difficult to track as part of your larger investment portfolio. But that shouldn’t keep you from keeping careful track of these investments. You just may need to track them separately from your budget and other investments. Then, add the balances manually to your favorite online budget and investment tracking tool to get a sense of your overall net worth.

Topics: Investing • Uncategorized

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