Entries by Jackson

Another September, another set of portfolio poll results. This year we have a bonus element: a "3D Look" exploded donut chart - I bet that's already caught your eye. But first a recap on what happened over the last year in the world of online financial portfolio tracking: Nothing Much. We could bemoan the lack the of new, useful features from the major sites; but that wouldn't do us any good.



So what are we looking at? The inner ring shows results for the period up to September 2009, the middle ring is for results from September 2009 to 2010, the outer ring shows the latest results: from September 2010 to 2011. Continue reading "Portfolio Poll 2009-2010"

Asian Citrus Holdings Ltd (ACHL), a company I've been watching for a while, had a 10-for-1 stock split on 4 November 2009. How is this shown on the chart on Yahoo! Finance? By a little black triangle:



Continue reading "Handling Splits"

RNS stands for Regulatory News Service, but you'll also see references to "an RNS": an article posted over that same news service. RNS is the official news outlet for the London Stock Exchange (LSE), a commonly used Regulated Information Service.

The Financial Services Authority requires listed companies to provide information to investors via a Regulated Information Service like RNS. News items you're likely to come across in an RNS are changes in the major shareholdings, interim results, changes in director shareholdings, disposals, new share issues, proposed share acquisitions...

RNS has been around since 1988, before then it was called CNS (Company News Service). For the full story - going back to January 1698 and Jonathan’s Coffee House - check out the LSE's RNS history page.

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 not 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...