You create a new Portfolio by clicking the New button on the main screen. Automatic Investor’s Portfolio Creation Assistant will guide you through the necessary steps. You’ll be asked to enter a portfolio name, add ticker symbols and supply a current share price.

Automatic Investor will then recommend you purchase a specific amount of securities.

After you’ve purchased the recommended amount, Automatic Investor will generate a new Portfolio for you. That’s all there is to it. Your Portfolio is now active! An example of a new Portfolio is shown above.

Once your Portfolio has been set up, you simply update the security price. You can choose to update each price manually or, if you’re connected to the Internet, automatically update all prices from the Internet (with just one mouse click).

Automatic Investor will analyze your Portfolio and recommend either you BUY, SELL, or HOLD. If you receive a HOLD recommendation, you do nothing.

If you receive a BUY or SELL recommendation, you will see advice on how many shares to buy or sell respectively. Simply place the order with your brokerage and update Automatic Investor once the trade is completed.

That’s it! You can manage your entire portfolio in just minutes a day.

The window, above, shows that the share price of YHOO was updated to $18.45. This caused Automatic Investor to issue a sell recommendation.

You’ll notice, in the previous section, Automatic Investor recommended you sell $1,389.10 worth of securities. You’ll also notice that translates into selling approximately 75 YHOO shares at $18.45 each.

You would place this order with your brokerage and wait until it is executed. Then update Automatic Investor with the actual order results, including commission costs (note that the actual order may differ slightly from the recommended order due to market fluctuation. Therefore you may have sold 75 YHOO shares at $18.30 rather than the recommended $18.45).

The window above shows how you can tell Automatic Investor about your sale.

Automatic Investor will update your Portfolio. You’re now ready to repeat the process with the next price update.

It really is that Simple!

The window above shows your portfolio after the sale of 75 YHOO shares.

Automatic Investor also allows you to view detailed quotes on thousands of securities.

You can backtest thousands of stocks and mutual funds with just a few mouse clicks, and Automatic Investor allows you to test in a variety of ways.

Fill in the desired information and click the Run Analysis button. You can analyze up to 40 years of daily data in less than 10 minutes (that’s 10,000 individual quotes).

You can also analyze multiple stocks and funds, with one mouse click, using the Multi-Analysis function.

Automatic Investor displays a detailed report on its performance and compares it to the buy and hold strategy. You can edit and annotate directly on the screen and then save the entire report to a rich text file for printing or viewing at a later time.

You can also display a historical price chart that shows you all of Automatic Investor’s trading recommendations.

In the chart above, a + represents a BUY recommendation and a – represents a SELL recommendation.

Note how Automatic Investor Bought Low and Sold High.

A Quote Data Format function is also included. It allows you to create and edit custom security quote formats for use when running the Historical Analyzer and the Optimizer.

You can choose to retrieve quote data from a file (rather than the Internet). This gives you the option of downloading (or otherwise obtaining and saving) historical quote data to your hard disk.

You can then use these data with the Historical Analyzer and the Optimizer – rather than always having to be connected to the Internet.