This section provides a beginners guide to XSM. It provides a brief overview as well as covering creating an initial portfolio, and building a portfolio. If you have already used XSM you may find it quicker locating help information on the basis of the XSM menus.

Before you use this program for ANY purpose, please read the accompanying license. You need to understand the full implications of the license prior to using this program. The authors will accept no responsibility for either losses or gains, financial or otherwise, resulting from the use of XSM. The complete GNU General Public License should be read, but your attention is drawn to the following conditions:

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

You should remember that the prices of securities and income from them can go down as well as up.

A portfolio brings together all the information relating to the stocks you own. A portfolio consists of:

• A sequence of transactions on a set of securities. For example purchases and sells.
• The dividends that have been received on the securities that have been purchased.

Although XSM can operate without a portfolio, this is unlikely to be useful and it will result in files being written in your current working directory. Therefore you should always create a portfolio. This is achieved by entering the name of the portfolio in the 'Select A Portfolio' dialog that will automatically appear. The name is entered in the text entry box indicated in the below figure. Once entered the name of the portfolio will appear in the 'Available portfolios' box and 'OK' can be selected. The portfolio will be automatically set as the default portfolio. Additional portfolios may be created at this time, by entering their names. If you wish to change the current portfolio chose 'SELECT' after selecting the chosen portfolio and to set it as the default portfolio chose 'SET AS DEFAULT'. Portfolios may be removed with the 'REMOVE' button. You may create or delete portfolios at any time, so you need not worry about creating all your portfolios at this point in time.

If you wish to learn more about managing your portfolios, you may wish to refer to the section selecting a portfolio. Once you have created your portfolio, XSM will continue initializing and present you with a dialog to make it clear there is no warranty with this program:

It is vital that you only select 'ACCEPT' if you are able to use a program where you will be accepting ALL responsibility for the use of the program.

If you have other users on the system then they may already have a set of securities defined that you wish to also use. If this is the case, you should copy their securities definition file:

cp current_user/.xsm/securities ~/.xsm

The securities definition file is always called 'securities' and held within the .xsm directory that exists in the user's home directory. Even if you do not wish to use all the securities defined by another user, you may find it more convenient to copy their definitions and then modify or delete those that are not appropriate.

If you need to create your security definitions from scratch, you should select 'Create Security' on the 'Securities' menu. This will provide you with a dialog to create a security. Simply repeatedly use this menu option to define all your securities. If you are using a teletext based system, you may be able to use the 'Find known securities' option on the 'Project' menu. This will download all the security names that can be found on the teletext pages and allow you to create them in bulk using a single security definition as a template for them all. Whether this ability exists will depend on the interface to the teletext information that is provided by your hardware.

With your securities defined, you can start to really build your portfolio. Generally you will will need to bring the system up to date with all your previous transactions. This is achieved with the 'Transactions' menu. Dividends can be entered with the 'Dividends' menu.

Before entering either dividend or transaction information always check that the current portfolio is the one to which the operation applies. The name of the current portfolio is permanently displayed in the main window.

Once you have brought your portfolio up to date, you may wish to ensure the prices being used by the system are also up to date. Price information is held in a special directory hierarchy that can either be system wide or private to a user. Your system administrator will be able to tell you if there is system wide price information and if this is the case there is nothing else for you to do as XSM will automatically use this information provided the system administrator has set the path in /etc/default/xsm. For example, to set the path to /usr/lib/xsm/ prices, the file /etc/default/xsm would contain an entry of the form:

xsmprices=/usr/lib/xsm/ prices

If there is no system wide information, or you wish to use your own private price data, you will need to define the environment variable xsmprices prior to running the program or set it using the 'Preferences' option on the 'Project' menu.

Once the system has been brought up to date you are ready to explore all the other features provided by XSM.