Many people opt just to select a basket of companies, and begin tracking their performance on a spreadsheet, by looking up or updating the current stock price. Many sites such as Google Finance or Yahoo! Finance will automatically track the performance of a hypothetical portfolio of stocks, after you enter the name or symbol of the stock into its interface. Each time you look at the portfolio, the prices are updated automatically. You can see what you initially “paid” for the stock, and its current performance.