Why a Crypto Porfolio Tracker?

While the cryptocurrency market started out with just bitcoin, thousands of new coins and tokens have popped up over the past decade. These new coins create a large amount of opportunity in terms of making money by buying and selling the assets at the right time, but the cryptocurrency market as a whole is also still a bit fragmented in terms of where all of this trading activity takes place. (For more info check out our HaasBot review or Trade Santa review.)

Due to the need to have accounts at a variety of different exchanges and perhaps even dabbling into the decentralized exchange ecosystem, it can become difficult to track one’s profits and losses in the crypto market. That’s where crypto portfolio trackers come into play. These best portfolio tracker app allow crypto traders to track all of their crypto holdings in one app on their smartphone. Many of these apps even integrate with exchange APIs, which means the process of tracking the value of all of the different crypto assets held by a particular user can be completely automated. After going through all of the different crypto portfolio trackers on the market, we’ve narrowed the industry down to a few of the best options for tracking your crypto assets.

What is a Crypto Portfolio Tracker?

A crypto portfolio tracker is basically your main interface into the crypto asset market. These applications allow you to view your entire crypto holdings on a single screen, and it makes it much easier to view your real-time crypto balances and manage the distribution of your investment into the cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Although everything started with Bitcoin back in 2009, there are now thousands of different crypto assets attempting to decentralize various niches of online finance. While some people like to just buy bitcoin and let it sit in an exchange account or wallet before ever touching it again, more active traders need these sorts of apps to get a clear picture of the status of their cryptocurrency investments at all times.

How Do Portfolio Trackers Work?

There are a few different ways in which a portfolio tracker can work, but the basic premise is that you need to be able to track the cryptocurrency trades you are making at all of the different exchanges you use on a regular basis. Of course, you could just open a spreadsheet on your computer and manually enter the value of every trade when you make it, but the point of a crypto portfolio tracker is that it allows you to automate this process and even gain access to much better analysis of your past trades.

The best crypto portfolio trackers hone in on the features of automation and personalization. When every trade you make can be automatically added to and analyzed by your crypto portfolio tracker, it makes your life much easier. Additionally, when your crypto tracker is personalized to suite your specific portfolio, it makes it much easier to find the exact information you need at the click of a button.

To gain the highest level of automation possible, many crypto portfolio trackers integrate with exchanges to automatically add your trades and create an easy-to-understand graph of your current crypto holdings. Of course, not all crypto transactions are made on exchanges, so users of these apps need to sometimes enter their crypto transfers manually as well.

Are Portfolio Trackers Safe?

Crypto portfolio trackers can be as safe as you desire.

While many of them can be integrated with your exchange accounts or non-custodial crypto wallets, you can limit the amount of power your crypto portfolio tracker has over your crypto funds. While there are some traders who take no issue with giving their portfolio tracker complete control over their exchange accounts, this is a not a requirement of using these apps. In fact, it is much wiser to only use these crypto-tracking applications in view-only mode.

With this setup, the crypto portfolio tracker will be able to see all of your crypto holdings, but it will not be able to actually send those cryptocurrencies anywhere. This helps protect you against the potential for a security issue in the crypto portfolio app from leading to a loss of funds. The whole point of cryptocurrency is that you do not have to trust someone else with your money, so it generally does not make much sense to give these applications access to your funds.

Do Crypto Exchanges Work with Portfolio Trackers?

Yes, many exchanges work with portfolio trackers via their APIs.

Your crypto portfolio tracker can be connected directly to your exchange account. In fact, you are able to do your trading directly from many different portfolio trackers, which allows you to get a full view of the entire market and the prices at a variety of different exchanges from a single interface. That said, it should be noted that putting a large amount of cryptocurrency onto one of these apps is not recommended due to security concerns.

If the company behind the crypto portfolio tracking app was hacked, they could trick the users of that app into downloading a malicious version of the software that is intended to steal customer funds. That said, it is helpful to connect your exchange accounts to your crypto portfolio app in a way that does not allow trading or withdrawals via the API connection. This is a setting that is usually altered on the exchange website rather than the crypto portfolio tracker itself.

It should also be noted that some crypto tracking apps also allow their users to connect their crypto wallets to the app. Much like the exchange account connections, you should probably not allow these sorts of apps to gain access to your private keys, as you’ll have no recourse in a situation where something goes wrong and you lose your money. That said, if you are more of a buy and hold type of trader who does not need to keep funds active on a variety of exchanges, then the view-only version of the wallet integrations can be a very good option for tracking the growth of your crypto holdings over the long term.

What Features Should I Look for in a Portfolio Tracker?

The features that you should look for in a crypto portfolio tracker will depend on your specific use case.

There are many different types of cryptocurrency users, so it’s difficult for one of these apps to fulfill the wishes and desires of every single person who trades cryptocurrencies. For this reason, it’s a good idea to try a variety of different crypto portfolio apps to find the one that best suites your needs. That said, there are still a few features that you should view as prerequisites for a quality cryptocurrency portfolio tracker.

• Personalization – Personalization is the most important feature to look for in a crypto portfolio tracker. Every crypto user tends to have a different set of crypto assets that they’re holding, and they’ll also have different weights assigned to bitcoin, ether, and every other cryptocurrency in terms of the coin’s overall share of the portfolio. When you’re able to adjust the app’s homescreen to focus on only the coins and token that you hold and keep the news and notifications to the coins that matter most to you, then you’ll be getting the maximum amount of value out of the app.
• Automation – Automation is another key feature to look for in a crypto portfolio application because this is the entire point of using the app in the first place. Yes, there will be some situations where you need to manually input a crypto transaction, but your crypto tracker needs to have a wide variety of integrations with exchanges, wallets, and specific coins to be as automated as possible.
• Information – While personalization and automation are the two most important features to keep in mind when choosing a crypto portfolio tracker, access to information is something that also should not be overlooked. This app is your portal into the cryptocurrency market, so you need to make sure that you’re getting access to all of the latest news and developments in the cryptocurrency space as soon as they happen. In most cases, purchasing a Pro or Premium version of a crypto portfolio tracker will provide you access to better information than you’ll find for free on Twitter or elsewhere. The crypto markets are still relatively small, so every second counts if you’re an active trader.