allows you to enter and monitor stock portfolios. Their site was slower than molasses in January when I was using it, but I persevered thinking that, for stocks traded on the LSE, the LSE might be able to provide a better online service than most.
Despite the fact that the LSE recently updated their portfolio services, I was to be pretty sorely disappointed. Here's a list of 5 things I think LSE need to do before anybody with an ounce of sense will use their free portfolio service:
1. Fix the interface for entering transactions. Selecting a stock ticker requires not one, but two (2) pop-up windows. In fact the interface doesn't even allow you to type in tickers you know: it forces you to go through the laborious pop-up search process! A ticker search for "QQ" doesn't even bring up a stock with ticker "QQ." (Qinetiq).
2. Automatically handle share splits, the LSE must have the data to cope with this. As things stand you have to enter a Buy/Sell transaction with a share price of 0 to compensate for any splits.
3. Don't try to sell data that's freely available elsewhere. Many links in the portfolio section of the LSE site will take you a page promoting their premium
"Exchange Insight" service at £14.10/month. However many of the features in Exchange Insight are freely available elsewhere. For example, here's a free
stock screener and here's a free
heatmap.
4. Rediscover tickers for companies past. When entering a transaction, there's drop down box for the transaction year that goes all the way back to 1960; however, the LSE site knows nothing about stocks that are not actively traded today. So if you want to enter historical transactions for companies that have since been bought up or ceased trading... well, you can't.
5. Be a bit more clever on handling the data that is entered. For example: link the stock transactions to the cash holdings (so a stock purchase decreases the cash position), and don't allow selling of shares that haven't been bought into the portfolio.
There are some nice aspects to the LSE portfolio site which I might go into another time, but there doesn't seem to be any reason to do so until they fix some or all of these fundamental shortcomings.
