Introduction

Given the speed with which the crypto-industry seems to develop and evolve it should come as no surprise that there are quite a few coin/tokens out there to choose from, each with their own purpose jostling for position. However, when looking at CoinGecko's list of all coins I'll admit I was amazed to find (after repeatedly clicking "Show More" and scrolling down for what seem an age) there were a staggering 5902 listed! So with all this choice, and a multitude of airdrops/mining/stake/farming/interest/faucets/trading and other ways to earn coins it is easy to see how most of us end up with a coin count easily stretching into the double digits. I myself am sitting around 30 different coins/tokens but I know for a few others on this platform that number is double, if not triple.

With so many coins/tokens, managing to get a handle on balances is a very real issue. A few months ago on this platform an author (forgive me for forgetting who) shared and excellent google sheets script that plugs into CoinGecko's API to lift out prices and allow users to create a spreadsheet for managing their balances. I for one have been using a modified version of that since then and have found it to be an excellent resource. That said this is still a very manual process and if you want look at any trading/changing of value over time you need to put together another spreadsheet to track your progress and snapshot values over time. 

Imagine my joy when, while browsing token information on CoinGecko, I spotted a neat portfolio feature with a little red 'New' tag attached to it. It seems like the CoinGecko team heard our plight and have begun developing features to help making managing a portfolio and tracking trades much easier on us. In this article we'll take a look at how to set-up and use this new feature. 

Setup

When you click on Portfolio you'll first be prompted to sign in. or sign up The signup requirements are relatively low, needing just an email address and the email to be verified.

If you don't have an account already go ahead and get one, you need it for this feature but also it means you can collect candies on a daily basis, which you can trade in their shop for some decent discounts, swag and general crypto-stuff.

Once signed up and logged you'll be faced with the following portfolio home screen, this is setup complete (easy as pie).

How-To

Right so once on the home screen it is now time to start looking at adding funds to our portfolio.  Click on the "Add New Coin" green button top right (image above). From there you'll be presented with a search bar as below. Just look for the token you're wanting to add by the ticker ID and select it from the list.

Once selected you'll be taken back to the main screen where you'll see some summary info. Note in the image below everything left of the red highlighted section is the standard market summary information. Those items in the box refer to you current holdings (if any) as well as the actions. Since we've just added the coin we haven't entered the holdings value yet so lets move on to that.

Click on the plus (+) sign to open up the actions window. From here we have three tabs (below):

• 1 - Buy, for adding completed buy transactions

• 2 - Sell, for adding completed sell transactions

• 3 - Transfer, for applying transfer (in and out) transactions 

Since we're populating this for the first time I'd recommend the transfer option. Complete the relevant information for your holdings then click on the "Fees & Notes" section. For this sections I've added a little text to describe the transaction, this is also where (if you'd transferred/bought or sold funds) you can add any fees that were paid. It can be particularly useful as it saves you accounting for the fee in the quantity field. Once completed hit "Submit".

With the first coin funds added you'll be taken to the main portfolio where you should now be able to see both the overall holdings amount and relative change for the last 24 hours. On this screen as well we can see the holding section now shows the balance for the coin added. That is it, one down and plenty to go, from there it is a case of adding all other coins/tokens you currently hold.

With them all added, if you need to make any additional updates/transactions click on the eye icon under the "Action" section to see the holding detailed view for that coin/token (inclusive of transaction history). You can then add new transactions form the top right as well as amend/remove existing transactions. Finally, if you add a token by accident then want to remove it just click on the yellow start at the far left (show in the image above). This will then ask for confirmation before removing the coin/token from your portfolio list.

So that is it, a whistle stop tour through setup and adding tokens/transactions. The platform is reasonable intuitive so I'm sure you'll be up an running with a complete portfolio in no time.

Final Thoughts

Off the bat I think this portfolio manager tool really is handy. Well done, and thanks, to the CoinGecko team for putting it together I've personally started to use this as a quick tracker and can imagine that some of the other authors on this platform will definitely find it a hand way of tracking transactions and overall portfolio performance. 

For the current functionality I would say there are a few gaps or possible updates I think the CoinGecko team could make to get the most out of this and really take it from 'handy' to 'indispensable'.

• Mass Upload- It would be good to have a mass upload feature for a CSV file to get all your startup funds in quickly

• Mass Download - Again a download of all the holdings/transaction, perhaps even with historic price data would be really great if folks want to do some additional analysis of their portfolio and/or trade performance

• Alternative Buy/Sell options - Currently when you put in a buy/sell transaction you need to know the unit price you paid (fiat). This can be a little tricky if you're doing token-token trades/swaps. I've found in these instances I end up just putting a transfer out of one and transfer in for the other

• Multiple Completion - What I mean be this is that if you wanted update a few things at once it could probably be done on a line by line basis for the whole portfolio to save on clicking between screens (guess this is just a nice to have)

• Finally charts and graphs - I love a bit of data visualization so some nice charts for holdings like pies for the whole amount, whole portfolio tracking over time, maybe even allow for a deeper dive on some items by allowing selection of known sub-groups of tokens (DeFi, ERC20, BEP2 etc.)

I hope that after reading this you take a few minutes to look at the tool yourself and see if it works for managing your own portfolio. If you can think of any other useful features you'd like to see there is a 'Give Feedback' button on the top right of the portfolio main page. I'm sure the folks over at CoinGecko will be glad of the input. Alternatively, if you're aware of any similar tool that you think would be useful please share them in the comments section.

Thanks for reading the article, hope you enjoyed it, good luck y'all