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.

I set up an account with MarketWatch, 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?

Continue reading "MarketWatch, I can't use You"

I recently tried using MSN Money to manage a portfolio of stocks, first using Firefox and then the latest version of Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. Either way the result was the same: complete bewilderment.

I created a new "Windows Live ID" account with my UK postcode, and headed straight for the portfolio manager. This was helpfully pre-populated with various US stock indices: Dow Jones, NASDAQ Composite & S&P 500. Undeterred, I hit the New Transaction button which took me to a page with a helpful message about selecting an account, entering "the price of the transaction in the currency you used to purchase the investment" and the "cost of the commission in the currency used in the account" and hitting submit.

It turns out even this limited and poorly explained functionality was a cruel hoax.

Continue reading "MSN Money Mayhem"

Google Finance was a breath of fresh air when it launched in March 2006 simply because you could search for a stock by name without having to remember its ticker symbol. Yahoo Finance has since caught up in this respect: now both sites have sophisticated search systems, both with auto-completion. Beyond that, how do they compare when it comes to helping you research stocks and monitor your portfolio's performance?

Research

Winner: Tie

Yahoo has more useful information available for each stock, such as transactions by company officers and directors. In fact Google even links to Yahoo's site for research reports.

Google, however, does a better job of presenting the information it has. For example, the ability to view news events on the price chart is particularly useful.

Both sites are decent for research. I expect Google will integrate more information as time goes on, and Yahoo will enhance their visualisation options (they have new charts in beta, but these still don't include news events).

Current Portfolio Holdings

Winner: Yahoo

Continue reading "Yahoo Finance vs. Google Finance"

It makes sense to track your stock portfolio's performance online: quotes are updated in near real-time, your securities are linked to information and analysis for each stock... All you have to do is enter your transactions at home and you can then check your portfolio in the dodgiest-looking internet café in Lagos without worrying about the sysadmin investing all the cash at your actual broker in ZZZBest.

This blog reports on the major websites that allow you to track the performance of a portfolio of stocks online, for free: Yahoo! Finance, Google Finance and AOL Money & Finance, etc.