Entries by Jackson

The second online portfolio poll is closed after running for a year; it received 68 votes in total - not bad considering the first poll got 70 votes after running for over a year and a half. In that last year CNN ditched their portfolio services, Yahoo! and Google made incremental enhancements to their sites, and Google Docs emerged as an option for those who like to do things their own way. And now, on to the results...

Yahoo! Finance is the winner for the second year in a row with 30% of votes. A round of applause for the world's favourite free online porfolio tracking site!

Google Finance is the runner-up, with 27% of votes. But it has the momentum, ceteris paribus, to overtake Yahoo! this year...

FT.com came in third with 12% - this is the most improved site: it only got 2% in the previous poll.

The new poll is ready, please go ahead and vote: it's in the right column of this page. If you use a site that isn't listed in the poll, please specify which in a comment below so I know to make it a contestant in the next poll.

Using appspot.com, you can now suggest ideas to improve Google Finance, and vote on other people's ideas.

There are some pretty good ideas already on the site, for example:

"It would be great if a chart overlay was available which showed you when you bought shares and the amount of shares bought. It would be a nice alternate way of seeing whether your shares have gained/lost value."

which is something we've mentioned before on this blog.

Click here to check out the site, vote and suggest new ideas...

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"