Add an investment account and let GlidePath chart your allocation

Most personal-finance apps treat your 401(k) as a single number — “your retirement balance is $437,000.” GlidePath can do that too, but it can also go a level deeper: track every position, pull fresh prices whenever you ask for them, and roll up your asset allocation across every account you own. This walks through setting that up.

What you’ll learn

When to track positions vs just a balance number
How to add your first investment account and positions
How prices get refreshed (and why nothing leaves your machine except symbols)
How asset allocation rolls up across multiple accounts

Before you start

You’ll need the account already added on /Accounts. The Type picker has five options, and investment accounts land on one of two of them:

Retirement — described on the picker as “401k, IRA, pension”
Liquid — “checking, savings, brokerage”. A taxable brokerage account goes here; there is no separate “Brokerage” type

There’s no HSA type either — add an HSA under whichever of those two matches how you hold it. (The HSA stealth IRA tool under Plan is a separate what-if calculator, not an account type.) Use the free-text Subtype field under Optional account details if you want your own label like “Brokerage” or “HSA” on the row.

For each position you want to track, have the ticker symbol and the number of shares from your latest statement.

When to track positions

Position-level tracking is more work than just dropping in a balance. Use it when:

You want to see your asset allocation across all accounts (stocks vs bonds vs cash) without manually adding it up
You have concentrated positions — a chunk of one stock, or a target-date fund whose mix changes over time
You’re planning tax-loss harvesting or Roth conversions and need to know which positions to move

Skip it (just track the balance) when:

The account is a target-date fund and you trust the glidepath the fund managers run
The account is small enough that the allocation doesn’t move the household totals much

You can mix and match. Track positions on the brokerage where it matters, leave the small 401(k) as just a balance.

Step 1 — Open the Holdings page (1 min)

Open Holdings from the top nav (under Accounts). On a fresh install there are no tables yet — just two empty states. The first reads No positions tracked yet with an Add your first position button; below it, “No prices set yet. Add holdings first, then come back here.”

The prices table is shared. If you own VTI in three different accounts, GlidePath stores the price once and applies it to all three.

Step 2 — Add your positions (4 min)

Fill in the Add position form. For each holding:

Account — pick from the dropdown. Investment accounts sort to the top, but every open account is listed, so pick carefully — nothing stops you attaching a fund to your checking account
Symbol — the ticker (VTI, BND, AAPL, FXAIX — whatever’s on your statement)
Shares — number of shares you hold
Asset class — pick one: Stock, Bond, Cash, Real Estate, or Other. This is what drives the allocation roll-up in Step 4, so it’s worth setting as you go
Cost basis (optional) — what you paid total for the position; lets GlidePath show unrealized gain/loss

Don’t worry about getting cost basis perfect on day one — it’s a number you can backfill from your brokerage’s tax documents at the end of the year.

Try it: Open /Holdings ↗ (works when the desktop app is running on this computer — just browsing? See the demo)

Step 3 — Refresh prices (1 min)

Above the prices table, click ↻ Refresh prices from Yahoo. GlidePath sends the list of your symbols to our own server, which looks them up on Yahoo Finance and passes the prices back — just the symbol list goes out, never your balances, never your shares.

The refresh takes a second or two, and it reports exactly what it got: “Refreshed 12 prices from Yahoo.” If a symbol doesn’t resolve — a delisted ticker, a typo, a fund your brokerage lists under a different symbol — it names the ones it missed: “Refreshed 11 prices. Couldn’t fetch: FXAIZ.” The positions it priced now show a current value; the ones it couldn’t are left exactly as they were. A partial refresh is a normal outcome, not a failure — and because it tells you which symbols fell out, it’s a fixable one.

What goes over the wire: the symbol list (“VTI, BND, AAPL”). What never goes over the wire: how many shares you own, the account names, your cost basis, anything else.

You can refresh as often as you want; once a week is usually plenty unless you’re actively trading. Refreshing only ever happens when you click the button — nothing phones out on a schedule or on page load. That’s deliberate: a price that’s a few days old still tells you your allocation, and you stay in control of exactly when anything leaves your machine. The page shows how old each price is right next to it, so stale is always visibly stale.

Step 4 — Read the allocation roll-up (2 min)

Scroll down on /Holdings to the Asset allocation panel. It groups your priced positions by the asset class you chose when you added them (anything without a price yet is excluded, and the panel stays hidden until at least one position is priced):

Stock — individual shares, stock funds and ETFs
Bond — bonds, bond funds, money market
Cash — cash and equivalents held inside the account
Real Estate — REITs and property holdings
Other — anything that doesn’t fit the four above

Anything you leave blank buckets to Other, so if the panel comes back mostly “Other,” that’s the fix: go back and set the asset class on those positions.

On the add form this is deliberately your call rather than a guess. Ticker-based auto-classification looks magical right up until it silently mislabels a target-date fund or a sector ETF and quietly skews the picture you’re using to judge your own risk. A dropdown you set once is duller and correct.

(One exception worth knowing: if you import positions from a CSV that has no asset-class column, GlidePath falls back to a keyword guess from the fund name. Worth spot-checking the allocation panel after an import.)

The breakdown is across all your investment accounts combined — your 401(k), Roth, HSA, taxable brokerage. So if your 401(k) is 90/10 stocks/bonds and your IRA is 50/50, the roll-up shows you the household-wide picture.

The big question this answers: “Am I where I want to be?” A 60-year-old with 80% stocks across all accounts might be holding more market risk than they realize. A 32-year-old with 60% bonds may be taking less market risk than they intend. The number isn’t a verdict — it’s a starting point.

Step 5 — Watch it flow into net worth (1 min)

Once every position in an account has a price, that account’s balance stops being a number you typed and becomes a derived one: shares × price, stamped with when the price was fetched. Leave one position unpriced and the account keeps using your last manual balance instead — which is the honest behaviour, but it means a single un-priced holding quietly opts the account out. If a balance looks stuck, that’s the first thing to check.

Open /NetWorth and the new value is already in the totals. Your dashboard net-worth tile picks it up too.

One thing not to look for: there’s no separate retirement-or-investment line on the trajectory chart. It plots three series — Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth — so priced holdings show up inside Assets rather than as a line of their own.

Monthly Close still asks about these accounts — and what it asks about is already the derived number. The close page reads the same account balances the rest of the app does, so a fully-priced account arrives pre-filled with its Holdings total and the date of the last price fetch, not with a number you typed. (An account with one un-priced position arrives pre-filled with your last manual balance instead, per the paragraph above.)

What the close won’t do is refresh prices for you. So the rhythm is: refresh here on /Holdings first, then confirm the balance at close — because saving stamps whatever is in that box as the month’s verified snapshot. Close without refreshing and you’ve stamped last month’s prices as this month’s number.

What just happened

You went from “my 401(k) is worth about $437,000” to a household split across Stock, Bond, Cash, Real Estate and Other — where the total is your shares times the price you last refreshed, and you can see exactly when that price was fetched. That’s a level of detail most planning apps don’t try to give you, and the privacy trade-off is just sending a list of tickers over the wire.

Your Assets and Net Worth lines now move with the market — one Refresh prices click at a time, on your schedule. Your asset allocation panel shows you whether you’re as diversified as you think.

Ask Glide about this

Try: “What’s a reasonable stock-to-bond ratio for someone my age?” Glide will walk through the common rules of thumb (110-minus-age, target-date glidepaths, the bucket strategy) without telling you what to do.

Common pitfalls

Symbols are case-insensitive but spaces matter. “vti” is fine, “VTI ” (trailing space) is not. GlidePath trims for you, but if you see “symbol not found,” check for typos.
Mutual fund symbols vs ETF symbols are different. VTSAX (Vanguard Total Stock Market mutual fund) and VTI (the ETF version) are different securities with different prices. Use whichever one actually shows up on your statement.
The price refresh is one-way. If you sold shares, GlidePath doesn’t know — you need to update the shares number on /Holdings yourself. Set a 5-minute reminder when you place a trade.
Don’t track positions for accounts where you can’t reasonably know them. Some 401(k) target-date funds change their internal allocation quarterly. Track just the balance and move on.