, a heinous process given the abundance of subscriptions, email alerts and membership benefits they would really like to sign you up for (MarketWatch is a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Jones).
However, what actually interests me is how well MarketWatch can help me monitor the performance of my portfolio online. The "My Portfolio" on the MarketWatch section is marked as "new"... should that lead one to expect something fresh and innovative, or simply a half-baked product?
Unfortunately, it seems to be mostly the latter: MarketWatch may simply have added this feature as something of an afterthought. On the positive side, one can enter the number of shares held for each stock, get live streaming quotes, and one can plot mini price graphs for a selected time-frame for all stocks when viewing a portfolio.
However, there is no way to enter actual stock transactions: date, price bought, commission, etc. MarketWatch does allow you to enter a
basis, but this isn't sufficient data for performance monitoring, and becomes rather messy if you have more than one transaction in any given stock. This makes MarketWatch pretty much useless for actually monitoring portfolio performance.
MarketWatch is also clueless when it comes to non-US stocks, for example 400 shares in UK:ARM at a current price of £0.995 are equated to value $38900 - wrong on many levels.
To sum up, MarketWatch isn't really worth checking out at this stage for monitoring your portfolio. Look instead at
Yahoo Finance or Google Finance.
