What portfolio management tool do you use?

[exnavynuke]

Personal Capital appears to lack a function to download your data. I prefer SigFig which does have that ability. However, the latter is really only geared for investment monitoring but that's of most interest to me.

Currently the only thing they let you grab is a CSV of all transactions. You'd have to sort those yourself if you wanted, but you can download that data. Though I agree, it'd be nice to be able to download specific data from the reports they have (such as downloading just investments data).

 

[kaudrey]

+1

+2 (Excel Spreadsheet)

 

[flotsamandjetsam]

Excel with a twist.

We have too many accounts and holdings, old 401(k)s and whatnot. As I have whittled away at our portfolio, consolidating accounts, my goal has been to get it all to fit on one printed page from excel. This may be an irrational compulsion but it has guided my efforts to simplify the portfolio. I copy the data onto a new sheet each quarter. I bought space on the sheet by moving all extraneous information such as account numbers and beneficiary designations off to another sheet.

Several years ago, I achieved my goal of fitting everything onto one landscape page. A thing of beauty! As I keep at it, white space has appeared at the right and bottom margins. I fill these newly won square inches with analytics: asset allocation, international vs domestic, taxable vs retirement, basis information, etc. I was even able to increase the font size recently! I have finally reached a comfort level where everything fits neatly on one page.

I realize that fitting our portfolio into 8-1/2 by 11 inches is, in and of itself, kinda bogus as a financial goal. It does drive real consolidation and simplification though. Every quarter I update the spreadsheet, print it out (one concise page) and review it with my wife. We mark it up together and I prioritize the next moves. Works for us.

-F&J

 

[jimbee]

I use LibreCalc for asset tracking. Management is performed using the website of the investment company. Management consists mainly of an annual Roth IRA conversion, combined with an asset allocation rebalance. Simple stuff.

 

[tmm99]

I am surprised that a lot of people answered "Excel" as their spreadsheet. I use Open Office spreadsheet since it's free... I also use personalcapital.com for Fidelity only because it lets me see the YTD rate of return (which Fidelity website is not capable of doing for some reason...). Other than that, I used online tools available at my investment firms.

 

[Montecfo]

I am surprised that a lot of people answered "Excel" as their spreadsheet. I use Open Office spreadsheet since it's free... I also use personalcapital.com for Fidelity only because it lets me see the YTD rate of return (which Fidelity website is not capable of doing for some reason...). Other than that, I used online tools available at my investment firms.

For me, I have a lot of excel spreadsheets already and use it in my job. it is not efficient to change. And I think i paid $99 a few years ago for Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc as a bundle for I believe 3 computers. So for me it is a good value.

Open Office is essentially a charity. So those tools are funded by donations
and you never know when it may stop being supported. I think it has a place, but I do not need the headache.

Other minds may differ.

 

[easysurfer]

Spreadsheet (Open Office, to be exact). Most of info I get from Vanguard, but I have few things (for example, savings bonds) outside of Vanguard so end up manually inputing Vanguard and other totals into a spreadsheet. I only update once a quarter and rebalance once a year .

 

[Fishingmn]

I use Quicken Rental Property Manager.

Easily pulls in data from my 10 rental properties, my business (realtor) and personal investments/expenses.

Been using some form of Quicken since 1991 when I met Scott Cook (Intuit founder) at Comdex in Vegas and he gave me a demo in their booth.

 

[REWahoo]

What portfolio management tool do you use?

Self-discipline, and lots of it.

 

[mpeirce]

Numbers spreadsheet.
Apple finally added the capability to have live updates on stock prices which is very nice. I'm in the camp of those who won't give my account passwords to a consolidator.

I use a Numbers spreadsheet too. I gotta get around to using the new stock price feature. I currently have a link to Yahoo which downloads all the stocks/funds I own as a csv file and I cut and paste into the spreadsheet.

Like this (edited down):
http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=aapl+vfsux+vtsax+swtsx&f=l1

Since I store it in iCloud I can access it from my big screen iMac a home, but also on the iPad or, in a pinch, the iPhone.

And I get all the customizing benefits of rolling my own spread sheet. My summary page shows me a few different ways to look at everything: with and without taxes (estimated capital gains and IRAs); pretty asset allocation pie charts; historical graphs; and graphs of specific fund/stock histories.

I also have sheets in the document that track spending at the level I care about: mostly broadly, but also detailed for travel. I can look back at what that trip to Germany in 2013 cost us...

The downside is that I've found a couple of bugs over the years. Nothing that was big, but if you roll your own spreadsheet you do need to check (and keep checking over the years as it evolves) for errors.

 

[W2R]

W2R-do you do this daily so you can monitor activity or balances each day?

Yes, every day or every other day. Like I said it only takes a minute if that to type in 7 numbers, and I do it whenever I am looking at the financial news just to see how things are going for me personally.

Vanguard has a watchlist function so I set it to show me my five funds as the default. I want to check my bank account and TSP every day anyway, to watch for fraud, so when I do I type in those two numbers too.

Over all it takes about 1/10th the time of brushing one's teeth, and it's much more fun. I used to have Excel set up to do it automatically but with so few funds, I found that I would rather do it manually so that I pay better attention to what's going on.

 

[OldShooter]

I keep track using Quicken, which I update monthly with all account balances.

For "management" I export the portfolio to Excel once a year during the Xmas/New Year week, My wife and I are always at our lake home that week so it is an easy time to look at things and make any necessary changes. IMO that is about the right frequency for management. We are investors, not traders. Most years we do nothing.

 

[Hermit]

I am surprised that a lot of people answered "Excel" as their spreadsheet. I use Open Office spreadsheet since it's free... I also use personalcapital.com for Fidelity only because it lets me see the YTD rate of return (which Fidelity website is not capable of doing for some reason...). Other than that, I used online tools available at my investment firms.

Well, I bought this version of Microsoft Office for home about 8 or 9 years ago. Its been free for me every year since. Back then, DW and I were both working and it was important that we could move files back and forth to work. I don't know how it is today, but back then, complex documents did not move back and forth between the Open Office and Microsoft Office very well. One of these days I will need to upgrade the hardware, so I may try Open Office again at that point.

 

[Fedup]

I don't remember if we had to pay for Excel either. We bought our Dell in 2013.

 

[Montecfo]

Yes, every day or every other day. Like I said it only takes a minute if that to type in 7 numbers, and I do it whenever I am looking at the financial news just to see how things are going for me personally.

Vanguard has a watchlist function so I set it to show me my five funds as the default. I want to check my bank account and TSP every day anyway, to watch for fraud, so when I do I type in those two numbers too.

Over all it takes about 1/10th the time of brushing one's teeth, and it's much more fun. I used to have Excel set up to do it automatically but with so few funds, I found that I would rather do it manually so that I pay better attention to what's going on.

I can see that keeps you right on top of things. Earlier in my work career I monitored everything very closely. In the middle part, less so as it got so much easier to accumulate, and so busy with child rearing and other matters. But as I near retirement, definitely watching things more closely. Perhaps I will become as diligent as you are as time progresses.

I appreciate the insights!

 

[GravitySucks]

Fidelity for investments and Open Office Calc for expenses and blue skying.
Haven't really updated or played with the spread sheet in a long time. Look now and again to see if spending is close to projections. Haven't done much with blue skying since the sailings been so clear since I retired.

 

[tmm99]

Well, I bought this version of Microsoft Office for home about 8 or 9 years ago. Its been free for me every year since. Back then, DW and I were both working and it was important that we could move files back and forth to work. I don't know how it is today, but back then, complex documents did not move back and forth between the Open Office and Microsoft Office very well. One of these days I will need to upgrade the hardware, so I may try Open Office again at that point.

Yeah, I used to use MS Excel also when I was w*rking, but I didn't want to pay for it once I retired (I did the monthly 360 for a while, but that wasn't too cost effective); hence Open Office spreadsheet. Some keys are different and some functions do go away, so I may go back to Excel at some point, but for now, Open Office has been good enough.

 

[braumeister]

I use a Numbers spreadsheet too. I gotta get around to using the new stock price feature.

Very easy to use. For a simple price, just use this in a spreadsheet cell:
=STOCK(A2,price)
where A2 is the cell with the symbol.

Besides price, you can get a couple dozen other attributes for a given stock. Very well done (although long overdue).

 

[CountryGal]

Well.. I have played around with a few of the suggestions. I did everything manually as I do not trust giving my passwords out to any of these tools.
- Looked at Google.. too basic and didn't see a way to see the allocation visually.
- Tried Full View by Fidelity. It imported my whole 401 as one account and I didn't see an easy way to get to the details. Maybe it had to be done manually. The tool seemed clunky.
- I tried Morning star on a few funds and then realized I had to pay to see any kind of analysis
- I downloaded excel spreadsheet templates that are on the internet. They seem complicated
- Quicken doesn't have the X-ray feature in the mac version yet.
- Personal Capital wasn't bad at all. All the tools are a pain to get the data into given 401 k funds that aren't in most of the tools. I was even able to split up the one Target Retirement fund into the appropriate allocations. It was able to give me what I was looking for.

That all said, I can see that our portfolio on the whole is too heavily weighted in cash/bonds and low on stocks. Given the current market, how would you recommend rebalancing? Dollar cost average over time?

Based on some other things I have seen, my 'small' taxable account that only has bonds in it should probably be mostly/all stocks. Hubby's 401k/IRA will probably be tapped first, given he is 65 and I am late 50s.

Thoughts?

 

[mpeirce]

Very easy to use. For a simple price, just use this in a spreadsheet cell:
=STOCK(A2,price)
where A2 is the cell with the symbol.

Besides price, you can get a couple dozen other attributes for a given stock. Very well done (although long overdue).

My problem is that many funds update their price later in the day (occasional later it seems). I need to write something in Numbers that keeps track of the old price, then tell if if has been updated today.

 

[W2R]

I am surprised that a lot of people answered "Excel" as their spreadsheet. I use Open Office spreadsheet since it's free...

Any time that I say Excel in this forum, you can read it as Open Office. I just say Excel because more people know what that is. But Open Office is perfectly fine for my needs.

Also I save my file in Excel format, not Open Office format, so that it is readable by various spreadsheet programs.

 

[braumeister]

My problem is that many funds update their price later in the day (occasional later it seems). I need to write something in Numbers that keeps track of the old price, then tell if if has been updated today.

I have another column that says
STOCK(A2,percent change)

As I said, there are a LOT of attributes you can use.

 

[splitwdw]

I am surprised that a lot of people answered "Excel" as their spreadsheet. I use Open Office spreadsheet since it's free... I also use personalcapital.com for Fidelity only because it lets me see the YTD rate of return (which Fidelity website is not capable of doing for some reason...). Other than that, I used online tools available at my investment firms.

I'm slowly learning my way around the Fidelity website. I have a IRA and a 401k there. I can see the YTD rate of return for the IRA under the "Performance" tab and the 401k under the "Investments" tab. I can see YTD, 1 yr., 3yr., 5yr. and since inception. Is this not what you are looking for?

 

[target2019]

MS home office is $229. For some, I guess that is too much to spend for 3-5 years of use.

Office 2003, 2007, 2010 professional versions were $10 each through megacorp.

I use Google sheets too. Stock data live is nice feature to have. Very easy to implement.

I've found that years of vba, data transforms, and spreadsheet wrangling has a nice payoff on the job.

 

[jimbee]

MS home office is $229. For some, I guess that is too much to spend for 3-5 years of use.

Office 2003, 2007, 2010 professional versions were $10 each through megacorp.

I use Google sheets too. Stock data live is nice feature to have. Very easy to implement.

I've found that years of vba, data transforms, and spreadsheet wrangling has a nice payoff on the job.

When the alternative is free, then $229 is too much for me. LibreCalc also runs on Linux, my OS of choice.