Software tools to track investment performance? What do you use?

[SamAdams]

Do you know of any good (free or affordable) software tools to look at investments over time? Let me elaborate: It seems to me most of the online brokerages I have seen like Fidelity and Vanguard only give you annual statements (or maybe quarterly) that show you the returns on the stock/bond/fund itself and perhaps on your holding as well, which may or may not account for withdrawals, dividend and other distributions etc. Further they do not usually have indices like a US dollar index nor do they have the ability to graph alongside a barrel of oil or oz of gold. Does that make sense?

It would be very useful to also graph hypotheticals like if I owned this group of investments, how have they performed year to year with a $x investment made in year 20xx?

I have heard some people use spreadsheets but is there a better way? If I use spreadsheets where is the best place to download data from? For example this was discussed before though it seems the comments were related both to expense/budget tracking and investments:

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...hlight=quicken

[c1ue]

Re: Software tools to track investment performance? What do you use?

If you have moderate capability with Excel, you can fairly easily create a series of formulas which allow you to do everything you note above.

Essentially what you're looking for is 2 parts:

1) Tracking

First decide the granularity (i.e. minimum time step) you want. In general, this is yearly but it could be quarterly, monthly or even daily. The difference is how gigantic you want the spreadsheet to be as well as how much work you want to perform inputting data. Note that more recent versions of Excel can actually directly download web pages like Yahoo finance.

Thus 1 row would be used to track value

With the price updates, then a second row can then employ formulas to calculate the gains/losses.

If you trade regularly, then you may have to add rows for security amounts (3rd row).

If you make regular withdrawals, but want these in cash as opposed to security amounts, then this would be a 4th row.

With the information above, Excel also then allows you to easily graph one or more rows for visual consumption.

2) What-if

As for what-if: this is easier. Again define the granularity, then define the global increase amount: a single editable cell.

For each step, you'd just multiply the previous amount by 1+global increase amount - in this case you'd use a fixed reference point to the above cell using the $ function (i.e. address m2 becomes $m$s). This allows you to cut and paste your cell formula as many times as you want.

Then what-if analysis could involve just changing the base increase value in the cell, or multiple rows each with a different base increase value.

Of course this all requires at least some work.

You can almost certainly get at least some examples to work from doing searches in Google for Excel spreadsheet examples for stock tracking.

[jiimbergin]

Re: Software tools to track investment performance? What do you use?

Mircosoft Money Deluxe did all that you wanted, but it no longer exists. Smartmoney.com has one, especially if you pay for the select version. I used to use both, but since I now have few stocks that are not gold, silver, oil or agriculture oriented, a simple excel spread sheet is all I need (actually I can do most of it in my head).

[photoncounter]

Re: Software tools to track investment performance? What do you use?

Do you know of any good (free or affordable) software tools to look at investments over time? Let me elaborate: It seems to me most of the online brokerages I have seen like Fidelity and Vanguard only give you annual statements (or maybe quarterly) that show you the returns on the stock/bond/fund itself and perhaps on your holding as well, which may or may not account for withdrawals, dividend and other distributions etc. Further they do not usually have indices like a US dollar index nor do they have the ability to graph alongside a barrel of oil or oz of gold. Does that make sense?

It would be very useful to also graph hypotheticals like if I owned this group of investments, how have they performed year to year with a $x investment made in year 20xx?

I have heard some people use spreadsheets but is there a better way? If I use spreadsheets where is the best place to download data from? For example this was discussed before though it seems the comments were related both to expense/budget tracking and investments:

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...hlight=quicken

I have been using the online portfolio management tool called Icarra (http://www.icarra.com/). I don't know all the features since I don't update my portfolio that regularly and don't spend a lot of time on the website, but I think it can do almost everything you are looking for and it's free.