This is probably a stupid question' but I can't understand what the cumulative cash balance under the transactions for an individual stock means. Can anyone give me a simple answer please?
if you sort your transactions by date you will see that you usually start with a deposit to get an initial cumulative cash balance and then each buy or sell (or deposit/withdrawal) adjusts the cumulative balance by the amount in the cashflow column (which is just quantity * price).
On the old site "cumulative balance" was called "total".
(On the old site, you could also just enter a list of stocks with no cash flow information and it worked something like an equal weighted portfolio. On the new site you have to get this right or the "gain" and gain%" columns don't work properly.)
A quick edit added to note that if you sort by date it can show the transactions in a different order from the order that the cumulative balance was decremented! So it is easier to sort by "cumulative cash balance" to work out what is going on. See example below of first part of one of my test portfolios which bought various stocks on the first day of the year. (NB: much messier copying with control-C from tables on the new site. They are full of weird extra rows, etc.)
| Date | Type | Name | Ticker | Qty | Price | FX Rate | Tax (£) | Commission (£) | Cashflow (£) | Cumulative Balance (£) | Notes |
| 02/01/19 | Deposit | 0 | £0.00 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 100009.63 | 100009.63 | |||
| 02/01/19 | Buy | Afh Financial | AFHP | 1388 | 343.00p | 1 | 0 | 0 | -4760.84 | 95248.79 | |
| 02/01/19 | Buy | Aveva | AVV | 199 | 2,398.00p | 1 | 0 | 0 | -4772.02 | 90476.77 | |
| 02/01/19 | Buy | Hollywood Bowl | BOWL | 2107 | 226.00p | 1 | 0 | 0 | -4761.82 | 85714.95 | |
| 02/01/19 | Buy | Burford Capital | BUR | 294 | 1,622.00p | 1 | 0 | 0 | -4768.68 | 80946.27 |
