what's the purpose of the 'type' field?

Well, one thing you can do with types is to group by security type in the portfolio view. If you do that, then you get a display that has all your stocks and funds grouped horizontally into the types you've defined. So you might have, for example,

Large Cap Value
xx
yy

Large Cap Growth
aa
bb

International
mm
nn

Income
rr
ss

and you can get a quick overview of your holdings arranged into types. But there doesn't seem to be a way to get that into a report, nor can you quickly see that your asset allocation is Large Cap Value 30%, Large Cap Growth 10%, etc.

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As for me, I've written a spreadsheet with things organized the way I want. With a push of a button, a macro downloads data from Yahoo's quote server, which I can then massage to my heart's content. Pretty nifty!

Lorenzo