Financial Portfolio Blog

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 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 (Update Aug 2010: Google Finance now use Reuters for research reports, but still use Yahoo! Finance for director dealings).

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"