Portfolio tracking software

[jimhcom]

I am looking for advice on software to track my portfolio for tax purposes. Basicly, all I want to do is track my sales and dividends without having to manually enter each transaction as I am now doing with Excel. I have read reviews on Quicken and Microsoft Money, and the reviews are not very good, I dont know if these people want more features than I want, or if I would have similar hassels. My account is with Schwab. Does anyone have a setup they recomend?

[whitestick]

I've used TradeLog by Armen Computing, quite successfully. They have built in filters, that you tell it which brokerage, and what your account and PW is, and the date span of interest, and it will download a spreadsheet, which allows you to make any corrections that need to made manually (like stock splits), and then produces a Schedule D for your taxes. It can also create a file for importing into the tax software (TurboTax for sure, and others I believe), so your tax efforts are greatly simplified. Prices are based on number of trades you make in a year (or period of interest). About $70 for up to 200 trades a year, $120 for up to 600. They even have a version for Active Traders, and a mark to market if you are doing that game. Certainly made my tax time easier.

[LOL!]

I've used Quicken and MSMoney over the years. Both allow downloading from your financial institutions, so you should not have to manually enter anything. Or switch to a place that has such downloading.

I've got about 14 accounts and make less than 50 transactions a year, so MSMoney works for me. I think it will work for you.

[magellan_nh]

I've used Quicken since 1991. It definitely has its warts, but I can't imagine tracking my finances without it. The tax record keeping (lot identification, estimating, reports, etc) is fantastic.

Despite the occasional lousy review, I suspect that either Quicken or Money will do the job nicely.

Incidentally, I don't automatically download investment transactions, but I do download credit card and bank transactions. I had so much trouble with investment downloads early on that I bagged it.

I think it works now but I'm just stubborn I guess. I'm running Quicken 2002 and if I move up to the latest version, I'll be on an upgrade treadmill, since newewr versions disable transaction downloading after 2 years.

I think Microsoft might let you download a full version of Money that works for 30 days. You might give that a try and see if it will work for you.

Jim

[saluki9]

Find yourself a copy of quicken 2005 or earlier. 2006 is a POS in my opinion.

It can't be beat for basis tracking and return calculation.

[audreyh1]

Quicken is great. Updating quotes daily is a piece of cake. Downloading transactions from your bank accounts and brokerages is easy.

I still go to Fidelity to download my year-to-date tax info.

Audrey