Online Portfolio Blog

With regards to Google Finance's new automatic split and dividend functionality, it seems that the number one request from users is "How can I turn this off?". The Google Finance blog has quite a number of comments to this effect, with few in favour of the changes.

The update messed up the portfolios of those who had manually inserted dividends as cash entries. This is understandable in that Google Finance wants to automate this process, and from an engineering standpoint it's easier to have one way of doing this rather than have several options. Also, in my opinion, the fix is acceptable: deleting the manual entries.

And that would be fine, if Google Finance's dividend tracking actually worked. Some examples of complaints given: for UK and Hong Kong stocks, Google Finance apparently can't tell what currency, denomination and tax deductions to use; it doesn't work for accounts that automatically re-invest dividends or fractional shares; it will count splits and dividends from before shares were actually purchased...

The response from Google Finance so far isn't that great, look for "Google Finance Guide Laura" on the blog comments page to see it. Let's hope they get their act together, and sort out this long-awaited, but half-baked update.

Google Finance have recently added support for tracking splits and dividends in portfolios. Their announcement is here. You can see the splits and dividends by clicking on the "Transactions" tab when viewing your portfolio.

The handling of splits is not perfect: it manages to calculate that now I hold 0.25 shares in a stock I sold out of long ago - something to do with a 7:8 split. Some other manual adjustments are required for special cases, e.g. rights issues, or if you received shares instead of a dividend.

Dividend reporting isn't perfect either. Reconciling dividends reported by Google Finance to those actually received would be an arduous task: I suspect Google Finance is reporting the dividends pre-tax (10% tax credit is taken off UK dividend payments), and at the date they were announced rather than the date they were actually paid.

However, I still think this is a huge step in the right direction. Once the aforementioned wrinkles are ironed out, Google Finance could become the one obvious choice for monitoring a portfolio online. Their recent interface update also certainly helped in this regard.