How do you track your investments?

Soriak_sl said:

I currently use wikinvest.com to check the performance of my investments. It shows, over various time horizons (e.g. last week, last month...), my investments' gains, dividends, fees, and my new contributions/withdrawals. It also compares the performance of my account with the Dow and the S&P 500.

Really useful information presented rather neatly. There's just one problem: it doesn't go further back than one year. I can't get a "lifetime" overview for some reason, which is really annoying. Nor can I select an arbitrary time period, e.g. the year 2012.

I use Mint to track my regular finances, but the investment tracker is just about worthless. It only gives a lifetime horizon (so the opposite problem!), and I'm not sure how it handles dividends.

I also tried personalcapital.com, which is an investment company that offers this as a free service. The problem is that they don't import historic data, so that's no good.

Any suggestions for a better portfolio tracker?

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I haven't found anything that displays more than 1 asset class, they are all mostly for stocks. Since I don't stock pick, I just use the bloomberg login to track purchases and download into excel each quarter. I do all the other asset classes from the excel - bonds, real estate, private equity, cash, etc. Excel functions can pretty much do whatever you need.

AliciaGeli_sl said:

I completely agree to the fact that you are saying. I am also searching for other tool to track investment.
sell house

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Still only the second best bot of 2013. Sorry.

I use Quicken for my all of my personal finance stuff. It's pretty good on budgeting, expenses and the like, but the investment performance reports leave something to be desired. No way to compare to benchmarks and the like, as far as I can tell. It does do a decent job of giving me a lifetime performance summary, subtotaled by account, security, year, whatever.

I use an excel spreadsheet to track my real estate tax liens. The XIRR function calculates my internal rate of return over a certain period of time. I'm sure you could make it graph that as well. Sometimes the simple solutions are the best.

Eomer_sl said:

I use Quicken for my all of my personal finance stuff. It's pretty good on budgeting, expenses and the like, but the investment performance reports leave something to be desired. No way to compare to benchmarks and the like, as far as I can tell. It does do a decent job of giving me a lifetime performance summary, subtotaled by account, security, year, whatever.

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You should take a look atwww.personalcapital.com. Basically it's mint.com with far stronger investment analysis tools. It compares against benchmarks, does a portfolio analysis, calculates what your actual 401K fees are, etc. Also, their tech support so far rocks-- I had a problem linking my Chase CC and they fixed it within 30 minutes of me submitting a support ticket. It's a free service however if you have a decent chunk of cash they assign an "investment advisor" to your account that will call you and try and convince you to move your investments into their portfolio. Just say "no thanks" and keep using this wonderful free service

Soygen_sl said:

Yeah, PersonalCapital is really nice, but as mentioned in the original post, it doesn't import historical info. It works well for new accounts or stuff you're only interesting in tracking going forward.

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Oops, totally forgot it was mentioned in the original post. Yeah, the no historical data is pretty weak, but that isn't a huge deal to me as I have other portfolio management tools that can cover this. Actually, believe it or not I use the CNN Money portfolio tool which is basically a copy-cat of Wikinvest except it has superior investment analysis tools-- I was actually surprised just how good it is.

Basically I rate them all as follows:
1) Mint.com: Excellent cash flow/CC/budgeting features but very weak investment tracking
2) CNN Money Portfolio: No cash flow/cc/budgeting features at all, but very good investment tracking
3) Personal capital: Very good cash flow/cc/budgeting and very good investment tracking but it does not import historical information
4) Wikinvest: Basically the same as CNN Money portfolio however I find it slightly weaker overall.

Basically, I think personal capital is the best all around service and plan on using that exclusively once it accumulates enough historical data. Until then I use the CNN money portfolio for historical data and occasionally Mint.com if I need to look up an old transactions

I don't even track my investments. I just throw money in there and leave it. I'm not looking to retire for another 35 years so tracking them now just seems to be a pain and will provide extraordinarily little value add. Once a year I'll go in and rebalance my portfolio, but other than that I can't imagine a reason to bother unless you are getting close to retirement. Which reminds me that I should probably go rebalance.

prescient63_sl said:

I don't even track my investments. I just throw money in there and leave it. I'm not looking to retire for another 35 years so tracking them now just seems to be a pain and will provide extraordinarily little value add. Once a year I'll go in and rebalance my portfolio, but other than that I can't imagine a reason to bother unless you are getting close to retirement. Which reminds me that I should probably go rebalance.

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yeah same here, except i only rebalance if something goes crazy and makes it way out of line and evne then im in no hurry

broker portfolio good enough for me

usually google.finance is good enough for most stuff if needed anyways

no point making a hobby of regularly checking your portfolio when it's pointless

annnd 5 posts, hello screenshots