Online Portfolio Management

If none of the free online portfolio tracking sites cater to your needs, you might want to try creating your own. Well, maybe not your own site, but you can use Google Docs to create a spreadsheet that shows you up-to-date stock information in any format you choose.

For example:


The company and EPIC columns are typed in manually, the Price and Change columns use the GoogleFinance function to find data for the given ticker.
Continue reading "Your Financial Portfolio in Google Docs"

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"...

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!

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: many people found the new feature messed up their Google Finance portfolio... 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.

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.