Online Portfolio Management

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 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..."

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"