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...

Reuters have a section on their site called Community Portfolios. It seems to be geared towards following and comparing other people's portfolios and their performance, but you can also create a private portfolio by unchecking the "Share this Portfolio with the Community" box.

Overall it's a pretty impressive system. It's easy to enter transactions, the site automatically figures out dividends, and can even display nice charts of historical performance like this one:



Continue reading "Reuters Portfolios"

We saw that Google Docs spreadsheets have financial functions available in the first post in this series.

For this post, I've created a Google Docs Template which you can view, and copy for your own use if you like (it's free). Click here to see the live template.



The template currently has 2 sheets for securities. The first is for open positions, i.e. your current holdings. The second, "Closed Positions", is for securities you've already sold: use this if you want to keep a history of your past performance.
Continue reading "Your Financial Portfolio in Google Docs 2"

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.

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?