Setting up a portfolio to monitor on FT.com this weekend was rather interesting. They're trying to create a more user-friendly and feature-complete online portfolio monitoring system than any other site I've encountered. To try it out for yourself, go to
FT.com and look under Services -> Portfolio.
One of the first things you'll notice is FT.com offers a comprehensive list of items to include in a portfolio: equities, exchange traded funds, managed funds, indices (for monitoring), cash and custom entries. It caters for both long and short positions, and even allows symbols to be entered under a "watch" status, not including these in portfolio valuations. Entering ticker symbols is made easier by a drop down of instruments that match whatever you type, including little flags to specify the exchange on which the instruments are traded. Another nice touch is that the required currency denomination is displayed where you enter the price: e.g. GBX for LSE-traded stocks. This common courtesy escapes the likes of Yahoo Finance, who appear
uncertain of the difference between GBP and GBX in any case.
What really makes FT.com stand out from the crowd is their attempt to
automatically handle dividends and to
chart portfolio performance.
If you enter shares in a portfolio, and a dividend has recently been paid for that stock, a notification allows you to ignore the (automatically calculated) dividend, set it as a cash holding or re-invest it. This is a feature that all online portfolio systems should have, but FT.com is the first I've seen that actually tries to implement it. Unfortunately, FT.com doesn't include dividends for the whole period a stock has been held when entering historical transactions, but I hope that going forward it will pick up all new dividends. One current glitch is that new dividends are also shown for closed holdings (shares once owned, but now all sold), but these dividends can be simply ignored.
There's a charting section for each portfolio, where you can bring up a graph of each portfolio's performance over time, and compare it to an index and any individual holdings in the portfolio. This is another feature that all online portfolio monitoring sites should have, but FT.com is the first to actually go ahead and implement it.
Other notable features: the FT.com portfolios list investment opinions from another FT publication, the
Investors Chronicle; the system also allows you to set up portfolio email updates for a time and frequency of your choosing. There are also some drawbacks to FT.com portfolio system. I've yet to figure how to enter the initial funding for a portfolio so that the valuations and charts make sense over the life of the portfolio. Also, the system does not cope with symbols that have been delisted (e.g. RTR:LSE), so it's impossible to create a complete historical view if you have owned any such stocks.
I'm looking forward to using FT.com portfolio services for a while to see how helpful they are on a daily basis, they're the most promising free online portfolio monitoring system I've seen to date.
