This post was a comment I added to a separate post on uploading into Folios from broker accounts.
I thought I'd share my experience of Folios as a post its own right to aid discovery, perhaps to spare some other poor souls a wasted day or two....
I loaded up a couple of accounts from inception to test the waters, one from AJ Bell and one from II. I do have my own trade records in Excel which made it a lot easier than it would otherwise have been.
Was it worth the effort? Not really I'm afraid.
There are quite a few major, critical flaws in how Folios is implemented at present.
- Infuriatingly, Folios lacks the default procedure of processing sale transactions before it processes purchases on the same date (you have to specify the time of trade not just the date). This means you keep going overdrawn (which it really doesn't like) on days where you sold & bought and it keeps insisting that you add cash before it will proceed. You therefore have to put some logic in your upload to add times to sale transactions so sales occur before purchases, or manually amend. Many platforms don't provide time of trade in their outputs so painful.
- Benchmark indices are capital return only - no total return. This makes a mockery of the "performance" chart in any relative sense as income is excluded from the benchmark. Indeed it also brings into question the "performance" charts Stocko show to evidence high stock ranking outperformance. I queried this with Stocko and they don't want to pay the licence fees for the total return versions. Given most of the total return from the FTSE over the past decade has been income it is just embarrassing.
- There is no ability to load up an ETF as a proxy for a total return index.
- When loading in dividends you need to enter the relevant share nominal at the time, not just the aggregate cashflow amount. Again, a bit of a nuisance, especially for overseas stocks where you'll need the historic FX rates as well.
- If you enter records as GBP it then converts them erroneously to GBp if you seek to edit the transaction post upload.
- Everything
has to settle back to base currency, which causes issues if you have
cash balances in multiple currencies (as supported by II).
- The ability to handle corporate actions…
