Online Portfolio Blog

CNN Money Ditches Portfolio Services

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:01:56 +0000

CNN Money, which we briefly covered a while ago, will downsize its functionality in a few days. They will offer a simple watch list, without the ability to manage an online portfolio. Here's their message to subscribers:

On March 15th, CNNMoney will replace the current Portfolio Tracker with an easily accessible and customizable My Watch List feature. My Watch List will enable users to track relevant data on stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs. As part of this replacement, CNNMoney will no longer offer site visitors the ability to track the number of shares and commissions for holdings.

This is probably all for the best, given that on previous inspection the services they offered were rated "useless"...

Show us the Transactions!

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:19:58 +0100

Both Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance can record one's portfolio transactions.

Both also graph share prices with markers for events such as dividends and splits; even news items in Google's case.

Why don't they also show events that are relevant to the individual investor? Like when one has bought or sold shares?

A green dot for buys, a red dot for sells, and voilà: one instantly gets an idea how good one's market timing is.

C'mon Google. C'mon Yahoo!. You already have the data, now show us the transactions!

Disable Automatic Dividends in Google Finance

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:06:51 +0100

Although not widely advertised, Google Finance have added the ability to disable the new automatic dividends feature on a portfolio basis. The announcement is buried in the comments on this Google Finance Blog post:

The feature can be used on a per-portfolio basis from your 'Edit portfolio' tab. The checkbox to enable and disable it can be found over the 'Save changes' button.

As you can see from the other comments, this was by popular request... Overall, the deployment should have been smoother with this checkbox present from the start; still kudos go to Google Finance for listening to their users - even if that simply means keeping their product usable.

Portfolio Poll 2008-2009

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:51:09 +0100

I've closed the first Online Portfolio poll, check out the archive for full results. The poll asked which website you use to manage your portfolio.

Yahoo! Finance came out on top with 18 out of 70 votes, closely followed by Google Finance with 14. Hats off to Yahoo!

Number 3 spot went to "A different website", so I've just started a new poll with a few more options. If there's a site you use that's not one of the options, please let me know in this post's comments.

Honourable mentions go to MSN Money, AOL Money & Finance and MarketWatch.

I'm planning to run the poll yearly, so if you answered the last poll, don't hesitate to answer the new poll in the column right of this page.

More on Splits and Dividends in Google Finance

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:06:38 +0100

With regards to Google Finance's new automatic split and dividend functionality, it seems that the number one request from users is "How can I turn this off?". The Google Finance blog has quite a number of comments to this effect, with few in favour of the changes.

The update messed up the portfolios of those who had manually inserted dividends as cash entries. This is understandable in that Google Finance wants to automate this process, and from an engineering standpoint it's easier to have one way of doing this rather than have several options. Also, in my opinion, the fix is acceptable: deleting the manual entries.

And that would be fine, if Google Finance's dividend tracking actually worked. Some examples of complaints given: for UK and Hong Kong stocks, Google Finance apparently can't tell what currency, denomination and tax deductions to use; it doesn't work for accounts that automatically re-invest dividends or fractional shares; it will count splits and dividends from before shares were actually purchased...

The response from Google Finance so far isn't that great, look for "Google Finance Guide Laura" on the blog comments page to see it. Let's hope they get their act together, and sort out this long-awaited, but half-baked update.

Splits and Dividends in Google Finance

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:01:59 +0100

Google Finance have recently added support for tracking splits and dividends in portfolios. Their announcement is here. You can see the splits and dividends by clicking on the "Transactions" tab when viewing your portfolio.

The handling of splits is not perfect: it manages to calculate that now I hold 0.25 shares in a stock I sold out of long ago - something to do with a 7:8 split. Some other manual adjustments are required for special cases, e.g. rights issues, or if you received shares instead of a dividend.

Dividend reporting isn't perfect either. Reconciling dividends reported by Google Finance to those actually received would be an arduous task: I suspect Google Finance is reporting the dividends pre-tax (10% tax credit is taken off UK dividend payments), and at the date they were announced rather than the date they were actually paid.

However, I still think this is a huge step in the right direction. Once the aforementioned wrinkles are ironed out, Google Finance could become the one obvious choice for monitoring a portfolio online. Their recent interface update also certainly helped in this regard.

FT Portfolio Charts

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:48:09 +0000

Setting up a portfolio on FT.com (see previous article) allows you to plot your portfolio performance, and compare it to a number of market index benchmarks. Here's the performance of a portfolio of 6 UK stocks compared to the FTSE 100:

However, the only way I've found to do this seems unnecessarily convoluted. The FT portfolio service allows you to enter stock and cash transactions, but I can find no way to fund a portfolio with cash, and then have subsequent share purchases reduce the cash total. Instead, when entering a share purchase, I have to enter a corresponding cash debit.

Am I being a dolt? Or could this be made more user-friendly?

GBP Means Pounds, GBX Means Pence

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:32:29 +0000

Stock prices on the London Stock Exchange are quoted in pence, often referred to as GBX, occasionally referred to as GBp. Brokers usually report fees in pounds (GBP), so it's worth paying attention to the denomination. When entering transactions into an online portfolio most sites expect GBX for the share price of the transaction, and GBP for the fees and stamp duty (Google Finance is an exception, expecting GBX for both).

Recap: 1GBP = 100GBX

Portfolios on the London Stock Exchange Website

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:35:03 +0000

Today I noticed that the London Stock Exchange (LSE) website 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:

Continue reading "Portfolios on the London Stock Exchange Website"

FT.com Portfolio Services

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:55:37 +0100

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"

Yahoo Finance: Pence, Pounds and Inaccurate Data

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:06:09 +0100

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: Splits, Dividends, Interest...

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:21:00 +0100

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, Interest..."

AOL Money & Finance

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:00:30 +0000

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

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 23:20:45 +0000

CNN Money 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.

MarketWatch, I can't use You

nospam@example.com (Jackson) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:08:26 +0000

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"