Online Portfolio Blog

Reuters have a section on their site called Community Portfolios. It seems to be geared towards following and comparing other people's portfolios and their performance, but you can also create a private portfolio by unchecking the "Share this Portfolio with the Community" box.

Overall it's a pretty impressive system. It's easy to enter transactions, the site automatically figures out dividends, and can even display nice charts of historical performance like this one:


Continue reading "Reuters Portfolios"

We saw that Google Docs spreadsheets have financial functions available in the first post in this series.

For this post, I've created a Google Docs Template which you can view, and copy for your own use if you like (it's free). Click here to see the live template.



The template currently has 2 sheets for securities. The first is for open positions, i.e. your current holdings. The second, "Closed Positions", is for securities you've already sold: use this if you want to keep a history of your past performance. Continue reading "Your Financial Portfolio in Google Docs 2"

If none of the free online portfolio tracking sites cater to your needs, you might want to try creating your own. Well, maybe not your own site, but you can use Google Docs to create a spreadsheet that shows you up-to-date stock information in any format you choose.

For example:


The company and EPIC columns are typed in manually, the Price and Change columns use the GoogleFinance function to find data for the given ticker.
Continue reading "Your Financial Portfolio in Google Docs"

CNN Money, which we briefly covered a while ago, will downsize its functionality in a few days. They will offer a simple watch list, without the ability to manage an online portfolio. Here's their message to subscribers:

On March 15th, CNNMoney will replace the current Portfolio Tracker with an easily accessible and customizable My Watch List feature. My Watch List will enable users to track relevant data on stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs. As part of this replacement, CNNMoney will no longer offer site visitors the ability to track the number of shares and commissions for holdings.

This is probably all for the best, given that on previous inspection the services they offered were rated "useless"...

Both Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance can record one's portfolio transactions.

Both also graph share prices with markers for events such as dividends and splits; even news items in Google's case.

Why don't they also show events that are relevant to the individual investor? Like when one has bought or sold shares?

A green dot for buys, a red dot for sells, and voilà: one instantly gets an idea how good one's market timing is.

C'mon Google. C'mon Yahoo!. You already have the data, now show us the transactions!