Investment accounts

Brokerage, retirement, HSA, and crypto accounts - cash plus holdings, priced automatically and kept out of the budget.

Investment accounts cover Brokerage, Retirement, HSA, and Crypto Wallet. They live under Investments rather than in the account ledger, because they are made of two different things at once.

Cash plus holdings

Uninvested cash - money sitting in the account waiting to be invested. This is the balance you set when you create the account.
Holdings - what you actually own, recorded as lots: how many units, bought when, at what price.

The account total is the two added together. Holdings are priced automatically as the market moves, so the total moves with it - you do not restate anything by hand.

They are off budget on purpose

Investment accounts do not feed Ready to assign and their value does not become budgetable money. A portfolio going up is not income you can spend, and treating it as such would let market swings quietly inflate your budget. Move money into an investment account as a transfer, and budget it on the cash side as savings.

They do count fully toward your net worth.

Recording what you own

Add holdings as lots with their cost. Pocketwatch keeps the cost basis and works out unrealized gain or loss against the current price. Buys and sells are recorded as trades in the account workspace, and selling draws down your oldest lots first.

Lots without a cost are flagged. If a holding has no recorded purchase price, Pocketwatch tells you so rather than guessing - cost basis and gain figures would be wrong otherwise. Fill it in when you know it, and leave it blank when you do not.

Linked brokerages

A linked investment account imports its holdings and their values from the institution, plus a read-only feed of the buys, sells, dividends, and fees your broker reports. You can still keep manual lots alongside it.

What else you get

Investments carry their own analytics: allocation by asset class, biggest positions and movers, a projected dividend calendar, per-ticker drilldowns with cost basis, and ticker search for looking something up before you buy it.

Investment accounts are included with Basic, Standard, and Pro.

Last updated July 25, 2026