Investment Portfolio Management Software

Anyone know or have experience of using software to help manage private investment portfolio? I'd be interested to get some evaluation or comments.

I think you would need to post a bit more information about your expectations and your requirements before getting meaningful answers.

Currently I use a spreadsheet to simply record updated prices/values on 20 or so separate investments ranging across individual shares (UK & Irish), a variety of different funds run by a few of the big insurance co's, and other fixed-term bonds..... I feel I need to get much smarter at measuring and managing ongoing performances of each one versus each other and in relation to some relevant indices so I can identify what's doing better of worse over time & take action. I could probably build performance measures & indicators into the s/sheet, but knowing the weaknesses & dangers of over-complicating a s/sheet I don't want to go that route. There seems to be a number of US -produced s/ware available - some free - but they seem to be very much aimed at the US investor (naturally!) with big focus on US tax & pensions angles. I haven't found any providers of Irish or UK applications. Hope that clarifies my scene... I'd be surprised if others don't have a similar 'problem'

I use Microsoft Money to do this. It will keep track of purchases, dividends, sales, capital gains & losses.

The tax reports, etc are US orientated but you can export the data to Excel. Ultrasoft have an Excel add-in that simplifies this although the built-in export fretaure may be adequate.

It is free - check out Microsoft for Microsoft Money Plus Sunset edition. It does not update prices automatically as it used to, but there is an add-on that updates the share price more or less automatically.

Otherwise, most of the paid for Personal Money software should do much the same.

jpd said:

I use Microsoft Money to do this. It will keep track of purchases, dividends, sales, capital gains & losses.

The tax reports, etc are US orientated but you can export the data to Excel. Ultrasoft have an Excel add-in that simplifies this although the built-in export fretaure may be adequate.

It is free - check out Microsoft for Microsoft Money Plus Sunset edition. It does not update prices automatically as it used to, but there is an add-on that updates the share price more or less automatically.

Otherwise, most of the paid for Personal Money software should do much the same.

Click to expand...

Thanks for that jpd. Sounds good ..I'll have a look & see how it fits ....

Downup said:

Currently I use a spreadsheet to simply record updated prices/values on 20 or so separate investments ranging across individual shares (UK & Irish)

Click to expand...

I did search for a program that would track investments across fixed income and equities sometime ago but I couldn't find anything that supported tracking of Irish shares. They were all very U.S. orientated. I gave up in the end and just opted for a spreadsheet.

Yahoo Finance has a feature which generates CSV files based on HTML addresses, e.g. (had to change this as I wasn't allowed post links) d o w n l o a d dot-here f i n a n c e dot-here y a h o o dot-here c o m / d / quotes DOT c s v ? s = A I B . I R & f = s l 1 d 1 t 1 c 1 o h g v & e = . c s v. I used these in conjunction with Visual Basic / Macros in Excel so that each time the spreadsheet was opened, it would automatically download new quotes for all the shares then copy this data from the downloaded CSV file into my Excel spreadsheet. You can also use Yahoo Finance to retrieve currency quotes to use for non-Euro equities to get their Euro value.

The main disadvantage with this is that is only provides two values for equities, the starting value and the current value, so you cannot see a continuous indication of progress, only if it is currently providing a gain or loss based on the starting value. It does provide a continuous indication for fixed income investments but this is a no surprise given the fixed nature of these investments!

jpd said:

I use Microsoft Money to do this. It will keep track of purchases, dividends, sales, capital gains & losses.

The tax reports, etc are US orientated but you can export the data to Excel. Ultrasoft have an Excel add-in that simplifies this although the built-in export fretaure may be adequate.

It is free - check out Microsoft for Microsoft Money Plus Sunset edition. It does not update prices automatically as it used to, but there is an add-on that updates the share price more or less automatically.

Otherwise, most of the paid for Personal Money software should do much the same.

Click to expand...

I think I'll have a look at this Microsoft Money Plus Sunset edition as well and see what it can do.

Thanks Daniel ... another interesting one for me to follow up

Another one to have a look at is the FT Portfolio site (portfolio ft com - just insert the dots)

Thanks Briank .. will add it to my follow-up list.

www.iii.co.uk is a fairly basic and simple to use portfolio holder. There is also the added benefit of the discussion forum