Setting up portfolio tracking with Marvin: a complete guide

We get the same question often enough that it deserves its own page: how do I actually get started with portfolio tracking? What formats does Marvin accept? Can he handle private companies? What if I want to add or remove things later?

This is the complete walk-through.

What Marvin tracks (and what he doesn't)

One clarification up front saves a lot of follow-up questions.

Marvin is a news monitor, not a portfolio tracker. What he sends you is information about your holdings: material news, filings, founder announcements, customer wins, regulatory developments.

Marvin does not report stock prices, position values, P&L, valuations, market cap, or anything that touches the position itself. That all needs licensed pricing feeds and a different shape of compliance than what we built. If you want account balances and live prices, keep using your brokerage app. Marvin sits next to it, covering what's happening to your companies, not how much they're worth this morning.

Step 1: Tell Marvin what you're tracking

Send an email to marvin@ccmarvin.com. The body can be any of these formats, and Marvin parses all of them.

A simple list in the body:

To: marvin@ccmarvin.com

Hi Marvin,

Please track these for me: Anthropic, Stripe, Polymarket, RDDT, COIN, NVDA, MSCI

A CSV in the body or attached as a file:

company,ticker,website
Anthropic,,anthropic.com
Stripe,,stripe.com
Polymarket,,polymarket.com
Reddit,RDDT,
Coinbase,COIN,
Nvidia,NVDA,
MSCI Inc,MSCI,

A spreadsheet attachment (.csv, .xlsx, .tsv all work), or a pasted block from a brokerage export:

Here's my Schwab export. Track these.

AAPL    100 shares
GOOGL   50 shares
MSFT    75 shares
...

Marvin handles the parsing. You don't need to clean up the format first.

Step 2: Confirm anything ambiguous

After reading your list, Marvin replies asking you to confirm anything ambiguous: names with multiple matches ("Reddit" could be a few things), private companies with multiple sites, foreign tickers ("BABA": Hong Kong or NYSE?).

From: Marvin marvin@ccmarvin.com

Hi Ben,

Tracking all seven. Two to confirm: Reddit means RDDT (NYSE), and Stripe is stripe.com (payments)? For Polymarket I'll use polymarket.com unless you tell me otherwise. Reply and I'll lock it in.

Sincerely,
Marvin

You confirm with a one-line reply ("yes" / "the first one, not the second" / "use this URL instead"). For a private company where Marvin can't pin the URL with confidence, the holding goes into a "needs URL" state; reply with the right URL and he uses it going forward.

Step 3: Set the brief cadence

Once your list is confirmed, ask for the brief in the same thread or a new email:

Send me a daily portfolio brief at 7 AM Eastern, Monday through Friday.

If you don't specify, the defaults are 7 AM in your local time (read from your email's Date: header), Monday through Friday, all confirmed holdings. The first brief arrives the next morning.

Public vs private companies

Both are supported. Public companies draw news from financial outlets, primary filings (SEC EDGAR for US issuers), and X. Private companies draw from general outlets, the company's own blog and press releases, and X. Coverage is thinner without a filing stream, but funding rounds, exec changes, product launches, and major customer wins all get picked up. Anthropic, Stripe, and Polymarket get the same kind of section as public names; the citations just lean more on outlet coverage.

For private companies the website URL matters. If a company changes domains or Marvin's URL is wrong, monitoring degrades for that holding. Reply to any brief with the corrected URL and Marvin updates it.

Editing your portfolio

Everything is a reply:

Add these: Anduril, Hugging Face, Pika Labs.

Drop Reddit. I exited the position.

The URL for Polymarket is polymarket.com, not polymarketapp.com.

To replace your whole watchlist, attach a new CSV and say "replace my current portfolio with this list." Marvin confirms before committing.

Pausing or stopping

Pause the brief for a week.

Cancel the daily brief entirely.

Switch to weekly, Mondays only.

Pausing keeps your portfolio set up and stops deliveries. Canceling removes the recurring task but keeps the holdings, so you can restart later. To wipe everything, "delete my portfolio entirely and clear any tracking."

Privacy and data

Your portfolio is private to you. Other senders, even people cc'd on threads with Marvin, can't see your holdings. Marvin's own tooling treats portfolios as sender-scoped (same principle as task ownership).

Common questions

Can I track more than one portfolio? Yes. Ask for multiple briefs with different scopes: "an AI infrastructure brief every Monday, and a separate brief on my main portfolio every weekday."

Do I get real-time alerts? No. Marvin runs briefs on a schedule. His strength is the considered daily summary, not the realtime ping.

What if a holding gets acquired or delisted? Marvin notes it when there's coverage, and eventually asks whether to keep tracking if the company goes quiet.

Can I share a brief with a colleague? You can forward any individual brief. The recurring brief goes only to the sender who set it up. A colleague who wants one emails Marvin directly.

Will Marvin tell me what my positions are worth? No. See What Marvin tracks (and what he doesn't). For prices, P&L, or valuations, use your brokerage app.

How to start

Want a brief tomorrow morning? You have one email to send tonight. Forward Marvin a list in whatever format is convenient and ask for daily tracking. The first brief lands the next morning, and the refinement loop begins from there.

Email: marvin@ccmarvin.com.