A broker app
A spreadsheet
Sphinx Risk
What you own, and what it is worth
Yes, with live prices.
If you type it in and keep the prices up to date.
Yes, rebuilt from your trades, at end-of-day prices — not live.
Placing orders
Yes. It is what it is for.
No.
No, deliberately. It reads; it never trades.
A return that ignores when you added money
Rarely. Usually the gain divided by the money put in.
Possible, with a daily valuation and some care.
Yes, time-weighted, day by day.
What your timing cost you
No.
Possible, with XIRR next to a time-weighted series.
Yes — money-weighted return next to time-weighted, and the gap between them.
How far it fell, and for how long
A price chart.
Possible, from a daily series you maintain.
Maximum drawdown, every fall with its dates, time under water and the typical bad stretch.
Each holding's share of the risk
No — weights only.
Needs a covariance matrix and matrix algebra.
Yes, next to each weight, with the number of independent bets.
How your holdings move together
No.
One CORREL formula per pair.
The full correlation map, and how it changed in 2020 and 2022.
A bad year, replayed on what you hold
No.
Needs years of prices for every holding.
2008, the COVID crash and 2022, over your current holdings.
What a trade would do before you make it
Shows the cost, not the effect on your risk.
Rebuild the model by hand.
Before and after volatility, drawdown and correlation, for one name or for every candidate at once.
A company's accounts
Summary figures, usually from a data vendor.
Copy them in yourself.
Ten years from the company's own SEC filings, quality scores and a DCF with every assumption in view.
Every figure explained
Rarely.
Only what you wrote down.
Each of the 49 measures has a worked example and a note on where it misleads.
Cost
Included with the account.
Free or part of an office subscription — plus your time.
The calculations are free; paid plans add automatic daily prices and the copilot.
Where your data lives
With the broker, by definition.
With you.
In your account — exportable as CSV, deletable, and no trackers on any page.
A broker app, a spreadsheet and Sphinx Risk can all describe the same portfolio. They answer different questions about it, and the honest comparison is not "which one is best" but which question each one is built to answer.
Where a broker app is better
It holds your money and executes your orders — Sphinx Risk never will. It shows live prices; Sphinx Risk works on end-of-day closes, which is what risk measures are computed on but not what you want in the middle of a trading day. And it produces the documents your tax return needs, which are out of scope here on purpose.
Where a spreadsheet is better
It does exactly what you build, and nothing else decides for you. If your question is unusual — a custom benchmark, an asset no data source covers, a calculation this site does not do — a spreadsheet is the right tool, and your trades can be exported from Sphinx Risk into one, in the same shape its importer reads.
Where Sphinx Risk is better
In the questions neither of the other two answers without work: how deep and how long the falls were, how much of the risk each holding carries, how the holdings move together, what a trade would do to all of that before you make it, and what your own timing added or cost. Every one of those figures comes from a deterministic engine covered by tests, and every one is explained on its own page in Learn.
The simplest way to judge is on a real example: the demo is a full dashboard over an invented portfolio, and importing your own broker's CSV takes about two minutes.
Last reviewed: 27 Sep 2026.
