Online Portfolio Management

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. Continue reading "FT.com Portfolio Services"

Lately Yahoo Finance has been having some serious trouble with UK stock price data.

First of all, there has been a recurring mix-up between pence and pounds in portfolios. UK share price values are normally listed in pence, e.g. a price of 211 means the stock is trading at £2.11 per share. Yahoo Finance manages to report the price correctly as 211p, but then sometimes calculates the value of an online portfolio, and the day's gain based on £211. This effectively multiplies your portfolio value by 100: while perhaps flattering, it is not terribly useful. This has been going on at least since yesterday, and has also happened at least once in the past.

Also, during one day this week, the market data reported by Yahoo Finance was different from that reported by e.g. Google Finance and the Financial Times website. Even the FTSE100 index had a huge variation. The explanation seems to be that uk.finance.yahoo.com does not have data for a large portion of Wed Sept 17th intraday data, whereas finance.yahoo.com does. Continue reading "Yahoo Finance: Pence, Pounds and Inaccurate Data"

Yahoo Finance is currently the most sophisticated free website for monitoring a portfolio of stocks. It has mechanisms to track buying and selling shares, and also shorting and buying to cover. Yahoo Finance also help you track cash transactions in your brokerage account: cash in and out, interest income and margin interest.

However, Yahoo Finance doesn't automatically handle all the events that can happen to your holdings. Following are some thoughts about handling splits, dividends and return of capital. Continue reading "Yahoo Finance: Splits, Dividends, Return of Capital, Interest"

Today I tried entering some transactions in AOL Money & Finance Portfolios Beta. The service shows promise, but by beta AOL really mean the product is not yet in a finished or usable state, unlike Google who seem to delight in simply labelling their functioning products as beta for a random period of time.

AOL Money & Finance Portfolios Beta includes stocks listed in US, Canadian and UK exchanges, and has a user-friendly mechanism to enter share transactions. On the downside it seems to have a less sophisticated mechanism than Yahoo Finance for accounting for cash coming in and out of the portfolio, and wouldn't recognise British Petroleum (BP) as a symbol on the UK exchange.

While using AOL's Portfolios Beta I came across pop-up windows that would print their html source in the browser rather than render the content, and input boxes in forms populated with code variable names rather than their values. I'll check the service out more fully once it's out of beta.

CNN Money has recently is targeted at US users, more so than Yahoo Finance or Google Finance. Indeed, it seems to know nothing about non-US stocks: a search for ARM on CNN Money will return only Arvinmeritor Inc, the auto parts supplier, without mention of ARM Holdings, the microprocessor architect.

CNN's site has a mechanism to enter transactions (rather than just holdings) and set a cash value to add to the portfolio, but is nowhere as sophisticated as Yahoo Finance.

Simply, CNN Money is not a great choice to monitor a portfolio online, and is completely useless if you trade in non-US stocks.