Online Portfolio Management

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.

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.

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?

Today I noticed that the London Stock Exchange (LSE) website allows you to enter and track 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 "Portfolio Tracking on the London Stock Exchange Website"

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"