Oh, that's gotta be a hard thing for a Microsoft person to read, but truth be told, Apple stock has definitely done better in the last few years than Microsoft has. Which isn't to say that the Redmond-based company doesn't have huge potential with its massive installed base and blue-chip status in the market. But today? Today it's Apple products that people salivate over, not Microsoft products, and that's reflected in stock value.

Meanwhile, back to your question. Indeed, once you start to take control over your Start page, you'll find that it becomes a lot easier to love than that boring old Start menu that Windows featured up until version 7. And you can indeed remove tiles you don't want and add new tiles you'd like to feature. Like stock tickers.

Let's have a look, starting at a section of the standard Windows 8 Start page...

As you can see, there's a stock ticker and it's showing that the Dow Jones Industrial is up just a wee bit, 0.01%. Any uptick is good, so that's a promising sign for our economy, right?

If you click on the Financials tile, it'll take over the whole screen with -- weirdly -- mostly just a really big photograph tied to the latest news story:

It also shows that the Dow could be doing better, but at least it's coming out of the depths and heading more into the positive range. Since I can remember when it was unimaginable that we'd break 10,000 on the Dow, getting up to 13,978 ain't too bad.

This isn't what we want, however, so you'll want to slide / scroll sideways to reveal more of the Financial area on screen, specifically the Watchlist area. By default it has a curious set of stocks selected, including Microsoft (unsurprising), Ford, Boeing and Exxon Mobile:

Let's start by getting rid of the Exxon ticker because I know I don't have any holdings in the company. To do that, right-click on the tile and a list of options appears on the very bottom (I've tweaked the following capture to make it clearer):

A click on "Remove" and it's gone. Do that a few times and you can get rid of stocks you don't want to track and leave either a blank slate or maybe just keep Microsoft so you can keep an eye on things. You'll end up with something like this:

Now click on the "+" tile to add a new stock and it'll prompt you for the ticker or company name:

I'll enter Google (ticker "GOOG") since I do have some equity in the search giant:

I could track one of the overseas exchanges, which is cool, but my holding is in NASDAQ so I'll chose that one with a tap (or click) and the tile shows up, along with Apple Computer, which I added in exactly the same manner:

Now let's go ahead and add Apple to the Start page, because at this point all we've done is change what's shown in the "Watchlist" on the Financial screen. Again, a right-click on the ticker tile brings up some options along the bottom (and again, I've tweaked the pic to make things easier to follow):

That's what we want! Click on "Pin to Start" and it'll prompt you to change the label from just the ticker symbol to anything else you'd prefer, like the full company name:

Done! Now when I go back to the Start page, there are two new tiles, as highlighted here:

Very nice, and now you know how to add or remove stock tiles from the Start page as you like, so feel free to add your full holdings, though if it's more than 2-3 stocks, I'd suggest leaving them all in the Financial screen, personally.