Entries by Jackson

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"

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"