Tuesday 31 July 2007

SmartPortfolio Review

Smart Portfolio is a FREE online portfolio management site.

Joining process: Easy

Just Click on the SignUp button to register - select a username and password. You need to supply a name, email address and postcode, but obviously the privacy conscious could enter the usual (eg. Donald Duck, duck1234@yahoo.com, 2000). I normally am happy to enter basic details for a free online service, but the lack of an obvious link to a privacy policy made me a little bit worried about spam, so I entered one of my 'junk' email addresses.

Once you have created an account you can enter information about your existing portfolio - this is a bit of a chore if you have a long established portfolio, with many dividends and DRP transactions to enter. There is no import feature, so this will mean duplicated work if you already track your portfolio transactions using Quicken or MSMoney. However, if you have a relatively simple portfolio and don't want to pay for Quicken or MSMoney this product is very attractive.

One bug I noticed when I first logged in and went to the Portfolio page to enter my portfolio transactions is that initially the Portfolio Value had an amount of $1,000.00 even though there was nothing yet in the portfolio! Entering a few sample transactions I found that the transactions listed correctly, but the overall portfolio summary was still incorrect. I couldn't work out how the portfolio value figure is calculated, and the profit% appears to be a simple total % gain, not an annualised return.

When you have your portfolio transactions up to date you can then run reports on Portfolio Analysis (trading summary), Asset Allocation (by stock or sector), Performance Chart and Tax Summary.

The overall layout is very nice and clean, and features such as the Asset Allocation and Performance Chart are very nice. If the bugs in some of the calculations are fixed (or at least some links to help screens explaining how the figures are calculated) then this site will be really useful for someone starting out with a portfolio. Until a transaction import feature is added (the is an export to excel feature) users with an existing portfolio and many historic trades to enter would be less enticed to start using this site.

Sample of data entered for this review and some of the results displayed:

Transactions entered:
Date Code Name Volume Price Commission Value
20/02/2005 CDF Commonwealth Divers. 1000 0.950 $29.95 $979.95 Edit Delete
13/06/2004 CDF Commonwealth Divers. 1000 0.870 $29.95 $899.95 Edit Delete

Portfolio Summary Displayed:
Value Change $ Change % Total profit $ Total profit %
Shares $3,700.00 $260.00 7.56 % $1,820.10 96.82 %
Portfolio value $2,820.10 $260.00 10.16 % $1,820.10 182.01 %

Portfolio Analysis:
Positions - winners / losers
Positions: 1 Open: 1 Closed: 0 Transactions: 2
Number Total Average $ Average %
Winners 1 $1,820 $1,820 96.81 %
Losers 0 $0 $0 0.00 %
Summary $1,820 $1,820 96.81 %
Ratio winners / losers 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00




Copyright Enough Wealth 2007


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