Best way/programme to track portfolio performance?

26th Apr '15 by Daniel Neale

18 comments 22753 reads

Hi guys,

I'm a young investor who has just started a tax free ISA. I was wondering what programmes or websites apart, from Stockopedia, you use to track total portfolio performance?
I am looking for something that can preferably track, or allow me to input:
1) Fees
2) Dividends
3) Fund fees? (not sure this will be that easy to find)
4) Total return on cash put into the ISA

Does Stockopedia let me do all of these, or is there something easier that you recommend using in conjunction with Stockopedia?

Thanks in advance,

Dan

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Daniel Neale

Premium Member

18 comments

andrewdb

26th Apr '15

As with all these things the answer is it depends on how much money and time and interest you have.

I am sure there is something proprietary and whizzy out there if you have lots of money under investment and trade a lot.

There is free investment tracking software out there, but seemed to be pretty us-centric and not provide much more than a platform does.

If you make regular contributions, buy something about once every 3 months, and that is it, your ISA platform probably gives you a report every 6 months or so and that is probably all you need.

In Stockopeida the way to track performance over time is to set up a folio (see the analysis tab), but the entry process for cash movements can be a bit long winded, so I dont, and there is no comparison with an interest rate or index etc.

In the diy area, I use hargreaves lansdown as a platform. I use google spreadsheets to track.

You can cut&paste the capital and income accounts from h-l into a spreadsheet (easy and convenient). This is possible from fidelity as well and I suspect most other platforms.(You can also copy&paste from the SR folios).

From that you can do tracking if you preserve the portfolio value by date every now and then.

A rate of interest is simple to set up and compare if you have a date history of cash balances.

marben100

27th Apr '15

You might want to look into ShareScope, which has a strong reputation for portfolio analysis & performance monitoring - but it is not free! I don't use it at present (use "home brewed" spreadsheets instead) but am seriously considering it, as the spreadsheets are fiddly & error-prone to maintain.

Henry Walpole

27th Apr '15

As a Mac user I would recommend Investoscope. It's about £45 (free trial available) as a one off purchase. It's very going at tracking multiple portfolios, performance, transactions etc. The support is excellent.

jjis

27th Apr '15

Of the free services I have tried Reuters and Digital Look seem the best at being able to handle dividends automatically. Reuters does seem to track you performance & compare it to the FTSE or many overseas / global indices, which is I think may be what you were after? You can also add or make cash adjustments too. The Digital Look one does offer more analysis of your holdings, by index constituent and sector plus lots of other tables. In terms of performance it offers a heat map and a table of changes for individual stocks over various periods, but not performance of the whole portfolio as far as I'm aware.

Failing that you could use a free spreadsheet package such as Libre Office.

Then you can use XIRR function to calculate your performance including cash flows in and out and dividends etc.

Hope this Helps.

Jamie

Compoundincome.org

Edward Croft

27th Apr '15

Just an update here guys on how we're further improving the Folios at Stockopedia... we have been working for several months on dividend automation, split/consolidation automation, benchmark customisation, lot matching customisation (FIFO, LIFO, Average), tax calculations & tax-loss harvesting. You'll have seen we've added portfolio analytics to all watchlists (not just portfolios) and there's a lot more analysis to come. Whatever features anybody wants we're happy to build so please do lay it all down here and we'll get it done.

jjis

27th Apr '15

Hi Ed,
Auto dividends would be good and if this could be reflected in a total return type calculation of performance that would be even better. I guess you'd have to decide between xd or paid dates for this or if you could do XD for performance and paid dates for cash statement, that would be a good way to go if that's possible?

One other simple (?) request that would be nice to have would be an addition to the allocation page on the Portfolio's to include a breakdown by FTSE, 250, Small Cap and Aim etc.

Cheers Keep up the good work.

PS. Still think you should think about offered a dealing account to tie into all this which could be great for users and your business too maybe?

andrewdb

27th Apr '15

Good afternoon.

Good to hear you are looking at Folios.

The thing that worries me is that all that automation is great as long as it completely and exactly replicates what my provider has recorded on the dates my provider recorded those transactions,
That is a big ask.
I think that a nice import - or even a manual process that allows you to enter a lot of entries at once will be better - at least for me.
If you want to fully track an index you either need access to the total return equivalent index, or the ability to get the yield on the index and if you do not accurately reflect the sales and purchases and dividends exactly as the platform records them, the tracking will not be accurate.
Remember this needs to work for US and EU stocks too.

On my (imperfect) spreadsheet I track against 7.5%, the IRR and the FTAS - all things I am sure you have in hand.

Other things I do that may or may not appeal to anyone else:

1 Using the assumption that the benchmark is 100% invested in an index, how much profit or loss did I make by holding cash when I have held cash.

2a When I sold something, did I beat the index whilst I held it.
2b What happened afterwards - if I didnt sell the stock, how did that perform against the index from time of purchase on
2c What happened afterwards - if I had bought the stock instead of selling, how did that perform against the index from time of sale on

From looking at (2) I have found that I have picked better than the index, but you would expect 2b would tend towards matching the index and 2c hopefully shows underperformance.
What I found was that I should have sold any resource stocks much earlier (no great insight) and on 1 day in '11 and 1 in '14, bought/sold some stocks for no other reason than it was a really bad day and I was hungry and a year later it is clear I really did sell pretty much at the bottom and my entire portfolio would have been about 8% bigger if I had sat on my hands, Thus the reason for trying to do something more rule-driven (like stockopedia).

I realise this is possibly a bit niche.

lightningtiger

27th Apr '15

I like Stockopedia for Folios. I use mainly 2 sorts. 1 for actual holdings in my portfolio. 2 for a watchlist of potential stocks to replace what I sell from my holdings. Just one click sorts them out.
. I use 2 screens , 1 for any stock that makes at least a 30% growth in a month, & 2 a list of anything that has made at least 100% in a year.
That done my portfolio holdings is with Hargreaves Landsdown where I can see the total value of the portfolio & any dividends are paid into my bank account.I could use Stockopedia for the holdings in the portfolio but then Hargreaves sorts it out anyway.It is then easy to see the total dividends paid each year from the bank statements.
I do not worry about dealing costs as they are usually more than covered by the profits as the portfolio gains in value as time progresses. Most of my portfolio is in an ISA & I mainly deal in Aim shares which saves in stamp duty dealing costs.
That works well for me, but everyone is different.
I could also use Vector Vest to keep my portfolio but it is easier to see immediately from Hargreaves the true value in real time.

Any fees on contract notes can simply be added up as true costs of running the portfolio.

Cuthbert C

28th Apr '15

Marben

I am a strong advocate of Sharescope having used it for many years up to a year or so back when I switched to Mac's - there is no Mac version of SS.

However SS does have some serious weaknesses in the area of portfolio management. It does not properly let you include cash as a holding in a portfolio - the documentation says it should work, but it really doesn't. I consulted SS support at length on this and drew a miserable blank. Problem being that I run several sub-folios - pension/isa/sipp etc and SS only let me have a single cash a/c so could not differentiate between cash holdings of diffferent portfolios. Only solution I could find was to create synthetic securities - XXCash1, XXCash2 etc. However using this approach meant that purchases and sales did not automatically adjust cash balances, so I ended up having to manually enter both sales and purchases AND associated cash adjustments - a doubling up of effort that was unwelcome.

There were other glitches in portfolio management too which meant that in a long and generally satisfactory usage of SS I never succeeded in getting it to manage portfolios in an effective manner.

I did use it for screening and for charting - its charting capabilities are massively better than anything I have seen anywhere else and much better than online tools.

If only SS produced an internet version or a Mac version, I'd go back to using them in an instant - but not for portfolio tracking.

Ian4321

28th Apr '15

SharePad, from the SS stable, is available for the Mac, but it is a different product so it might not suit you. I thought I would mention it in view of your last paragraph.

Cuthbert C

28th Apr '15

Ian

thanks very much for that - I was not aware of that - surprising that SS have not emailed ex-customers about this new product

I'll have a look see and compare it with Investoscope - but don't hold your breath......

T

Calalily

28th Apr '15

I thought Sharepad was for various tablets rather than a Mac PC?

Ian4321

28th Apr '15

It's for tablets, Macs and PCs.

UK Value Investor

28th Apr '15

I use ShareScope as well for portfolio management as it's the best thing out there at the moment. I've never had issues with it tracking cash in my portfolio. Will be good if Stockopedia does something similar as we'll have a choice other than ShareScope and spreadsheets.

I would say that with any portfolio tracking software it's a good idea to sanity check it once a month in case things go awry for some reason. E.g. I've occasionally had incorrect dividends coming through in ShareScope, and you still need to manually do things like rights issues, spin-offs and so on.

Cuthbert C

29th Apr '15

re Sharescope

I manage multiple "physical" sub-portfolios which I think of as being organised into a logical tree structure. The sub-portfolios are consolidated into group portfolios so for example my SIPP portfolio (which is with one provider) and my SSAS portfolio (which is with another) are consolidated into my total pension portfolio. My pension portfolio is, in turn consolidated with my wife's pension portfolio to show our combined pension situation. Ditto ISA's and other investments. And then everything is consolidated into a global view - the Grand Total Portfolio.

Each sub-portfolio contains a cash balance which needs to be shown at the lowest level and also needs to be consolidated into the superset group portfolio at each level of the tree structure as the consolidation progresses.

Sharescope simply could not do this or anything remotely like it. I could have set up a single cash account which represented the combined cash holdings of pensions, isas, etc etc and did not tie into any of the cash balances recorded within each wrapper. That of course would have been a very poor solution but even that wouldn't have worked because the facility to adjust cash balances when shares were purchased or sold required the cash a/c to be at the lowest level of the tree structure - which was incompatible with the idea of a single over-arching cash a/c. So basically the SS cash management facility simply did not match the real world needs of anyone with multiple portfolios - which I imagine is a large number of people.

Just to be clear, the reason for doing the consolidation as described above is so that I can see the total holdings of a given security which might be held in several different sub-portfolios and so I can do portfolio analysis at different levels. What's the overall exposure of the several different pension funds? what's my wife's exposure? what's out global exposure? etc etc And if I wanted to buy something - where was the cash sitting?

When I used SS I had to create synthetic cash a/c's (treating cash as if it were an unlisted security (CASH-1, CASH-2 etc etc ). I did not record every transaction but simply recorded current holdings and cash balances - as extracted from provider data. I used to update the SS portfolios manually every week. All this meant that SS was not able to provide me with historic portfolio performance data.

I ended up using SS as a decision support tool but using XL spreadsheets to keep performance records. It was a bit messy and more trouble than I'd have liked.

The thing that made SS worthwhile was the data mining and the charting. I'm not a fan of technical analysis - it seems like voodoo to me, but I can process share price data much more easily when it is presented in graphical form and SS really excels at that. I used it to help me time transactions and experienced a decent degree of success in that endeavour.

Anyway I'll take a look at the 2 alternatives mentioned above and see what I think. Somewhat negative at the £200+ per year price tag of the SS Mac offer I have to say but I'll have a look.

DerekWalker

20th Jun '16

Widen currency range for portfolios so shares can be tracked in local currency and a base currecny. Check out Sharesight.com that tracks capital, income and forex gain/loss.

cig

20th Jun '16

While doing that, I'd recommend generalising the concept of "currency" so that the portfolio can be tracked in any quoted unit (e.g. be able to use any share or ETF as the portfolio valuation unit, to track relative performance). It also simplifies the code to treat currencies as instances of a generalised financial instrument (they're not really special other than in people's perception).

jjis

22nd Jun '16

There is also a fairly cheap Cross platform software package which might help with Performance Tracking and monitoring portfolios, called Stockmarketeye. Hope this might help.

Regards

Jamie

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Daniel Neale

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