New Monevator readers often ask what’s the best way to track and manage their portfolios.
Old hands may rock a custom spreadsheet. One that’s more sophisticated than the software aboard an Apollo spacecraft.
However I’d happily recommend Morningstar’s Portfolio Manager. It’s a free online portfolio tracking tool that does the important things well.
This portfolio tracker automates returns for a wide range of investments. You can easily dial-up funds and ETFs, shares, and investment trusts from its enormous database.
All you have to do is input your trades.
With Portfolio Manager you can track your performance in XIRR money-weighted or unitisation time-weighted mode.
You can also assess your progress against an index, and ever-popular time-frames, such as the last ten years, year-to-date – or even yesterday.
The tool comes courtesy of Morningstar – the financial data powerhouse. It’s number-crunching is widely white-labelled1, including by a number of UK platforms.
Portfolio tracking features
Let’s run through the main features of Portfolio Manager. (You can see Monevator’s Slow & Steady portfolio in the pics below).
Snapshot
Behold the at-a-glance overview screen! Here you’ll find your investments’ price, market value, number of shares, and asset allocation percentage.
This snapshot lets you maintain a unified view of your investments. Especially handy if they’re diversified across multiple brokers.
Now check out the ‘Add a Transaction to This Portfolio’ zone towards the bottom. Woah!
This is where you fill in your latest trades from your contract notes.
The portfolio tracking tool then automatically updates your portfolio in line with your market machinations.
Performance
This is my favourite screen. (Okay, I don’t get out much, pandemic or no.)
With the Performance tab, you can watch your portfolio race your benchmark on the graph at the top.
Here we see the bond-heavy Slow & Steady portfolio (green line) is lagging the FTSE All-Share (blue line) this year.
The same Tron Light Cycle battle plays out in numbers in the Trailing Returns section.
Total Return is your portfolio’s time-weighted, unitised annual performance. The Investor likes this metric. (So does the fund industry.)
Personal Return is your portfolio’s money-weighted, annualised performance. It’s also known as the Geometric Return or Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR). This is what I care about.
The Holding section shows the time-weighted return contribution of the individual investments you currently own. It’s fascinating to see how strategic asset allocation decisions have played out over the years.
Some expectations are confirmed, such as equities beating bonds.
Other predictions have been confounded. Like, for instance, prior calls for a decade of poor returns for US equities. (The US market was the driving force behind the stellar results of the Vanguard FTSE Developed World and Global Small Cap funds).
Note, Morningstar’s returns are nominal. Subtract average inflation to get your real2 returns.
Gain/Loss
The Gain/Loss tab shows you the contribution made by every investment you’ve ever held. It’s quite the trip down memory lane. Especially if your past is strewn with ten-baggers and questionable buys you regret like kipper ties.
Fundamental
Sometimes I check Morningstar’s Price to Earnings Forward guidance (P/E Forward) to see which investments look good value. Lower numbers are better, in theory. But I don’t really trust this metric.
UK equities looks relatively cheap. If nothing else, that makes me feel less queasy about rebalancing into the FTSE All-Share.
Transactions
You can input your trades, review every change back to the year dot, record dividends, split shares, and set up regular purchases.
Tracking device
I’ve skipped past functionality I don’t use, such as email alerts. I’ve also ignored the extended play you unlock with a Morningstar subscription.
The freemium model gives you five portfolios gratis. That’s great if you’re managing multiple allocations on behalf of family members, or you’re juggling different investing objectives.
(You could use a slot to peer into a parallel universe where you didn’t sell that golden ticket. Although that way madness lies.)
Boring!
Staring at the screenshots, scornful of the shabby interface?
Congratulations, you’ve spotted one of Portfolio Manager’s best features.
This tool is not mobile-optimised. Indeed Morningstar hasn’t made a single UX improvement in over a decade.
It’s not compelling, it’s not addictive, and I don’t want to sneak a peek every ten minutes…
…and such old school clunkiness is an advantage when Silicon Valley is using every psychological trick in the book to bend my attention towards its fruit machines.
Portfolio Manager harks back to a more utilitarian Internet age. An era when tools did one thing well enough, and not every app let you order pizza and ethereum.
Anyway, I’ve used Portfolio Manager for well over ten years. I’ve never regretted it. My manual spreadsheet now gathers dust.
Take it steady,
The Accumulator
For people that like to stay away from companies storing your financial data, there is the excellent Portfolio Performance tool, which runs on all major desktop platforms. Its managed as open source project but has a wide international user base also in its forums.
https://www.portfolio-performance.info/
Looks a good tool. Seems a bit slow although maybe there’s a massive influx of traffic due to this post.
Is the passive portfolio real, or does it only exist through this tool? Is there “skin in the game”?
Hey Monevator. I had to demise use of Morningstar when I purchased my first few Asia stocks a few months ago, their support of non-UK non-US is a little limited. I also struggled over the years to get reliable CAGR estimates.
I have my own spreadsheets, but actually use ‘My Stocks Portfolio and Widget’ by Peeksoft as my main tracker now. Believe it’s on iOS also. Pretty amazing set of capabilities for an app, well worth a look for your subscribers.
Luke (no affiliation with Peeksoft!!)
As another suggestion, with a marginally better (but certainly not addictive) user interface: Sharesight (https://www.sharesight.com/uk/)
On the passive accumulation front one of the ‘advantages’ is that the free tier only allows you to track 10 holdings.
Major disadvantage (from my view) is that it doesn’t have great support for multi-currency portfolios or aggregation.
I used to use it
Based on this I went back to have a look at an old portfolio – it seems it doesn’t handle share splits very well
My Bankers is showing a -88% drop since June 2020
But have they fixed their site to use HTTPS yet?
I have an email from 2017 where Morningstar admitted to me that their site is insecure.
I’ve been using the Morningstar portfolio manager for a couple of months, and find it straightforward, and very useful.
What I would also find useful is some kind of functionality whereby I could keep track of the geographical spread, and percentages, across my various investments. That functionality is present in the Vanguard Investor system. Would be handy, though, to be able to bring into the equation my non-Vanguard funds, without having to sit down and do all the arithmatic manually.
A large part of my investments is in my pension ‘life’ fund, which is based on other funds that are stock market based. Unfortunately, I don’t think that you can track any of these life funds in the usual way, I get prices from my pension provider (more or less daily).
Just tried this. The tool is far too slow to make any practical use of. It would take all day to input a portfolio of 10 or more funds. Maybe I tried at a busy time but even so I don’t want to be pinned down to only using it at particular times of the day.
I’d love to give the Morningstar portfolio manager a try, but their account creation process simply does not work for me (on Mac/Safari 14.1.2, no content blocker). The registration form completes OK but the ‘sign up’ button does nothing.
Just my 10 cents.
Since study after study shows the best performing investment accounts belong to people who invest in index trackers and then forgot they had them, why not..
…not track
Bung in your SIPP and ISA at the start of each tax year, do a few transactions to rebalance…
…and then not look at your investments again until 6th April the next year
Wait ten years and maybe take a look at your LTA projection.
There are a lot more interesting things out in the world than net worth trackers and the market is going to do what it is going to do whether you are watching or not.
The illusion of control a spreadsheet gives is just a comforting lie.
@Neverland I completely understand where you are coming from but one’s perspective changes in the de-cumulation phase, when one has to decide which investments to sell and precisely when, in order to generate that quarter/month’s income 🙂
Unfortunately I find the Morningstar tool completely unusable. I’ve tried multiple browsers but many of the buttons don’t work for me. I’ve tried multiple times over the last year too. therefore I use trustnet instead, which although has limited features, at least I can get it to work
@mjcross I was interested that you sell investments each month/quarter in the de-cumulation phase and need to make a decision so frequently.
I have been living exclusively off an investment portfolio for 14+ years now and have always had a cash-stash ( or near to cash ) that supports living costs for a reasonable period. (More like years than months)
Normal portfolio management, eg rebalancing , CGT harvesting , occasional bursts of naughty active trades etc offer an opportunity to top up the cash, by just siphoning a bit off.
It sounds like a very active de-cumulation policy.
@mjcross
You can have an equally snoozy decumulation strategy if you have a low enough SWR planned
Thanks for this, been using this tool for a while but stopped adding transactions as it gets a bit messy for my liking
I find the bogleheads ‘Calculating personal returns’ spreadsheet really useful, not nearly the same but tells me what I need to know and only requires adding current balances, deposits and withdrawals…
https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Calculating_personal_returns
@Aardvark
If you can get hold of the ISIN from the Life/Pension Company you might be able to track it with the FT Portfolio tool. My OH has Pru/LGPS pension and I can track the two internal funds.
@ Henning, Luke, Kieran – Thank you! I hoped others would share their finds. Looking forward to trying out your suggestions.
@ ADT – I’ve always found Morningstar to be a bit slow and clunky. I just live with it because it does what I need for free. The Slow & Steady portfolio is a model, not my actual portfolio. The skin in the game is that it’s pretty similar to my owned portfolio. Mine is built on the same principles but with different asset allocations that suit my particular situation. I’ve made bigger bets on risk factors – which stubbornly refuse to pay off
@ srdj – yes, HTTPS. The faithful padlock is there and everything.
@ Andrew Preston – you can get that extra functionality through their Instant X-Ray tool. It used to be free but isn’t anymore. However, you can have a 2-week free trial. I use that to review my portfolio occasionally.
@ Aardvark – if that’s a fund with an ISIN number then send me the number. I’ll see if I can find it.
@ Chris – it’s slow but not that bad. I’ve been using it for years and I’m prone to get frustrated with inanimate objects But agreed, it’s not slick.
@ mjcross – I’m on a Mac but use Chrome / Firefox. I have a nagging feeling I’ve come across that Safari problem way back when. That is another issue with Morningstar. If you come across a problem that really bothers you today, there’s slim hope they’ll fix it in the future.
@ Neverland – there’s truth and wisdom in what you say. Obsessive tracking can be counterproductive. On the other hand, I’ve just reviewed someone’s portfolio who hasn’t kept tabs on what they’re doing. It’s a mess, over 30 holdings, massive overlap between them, stuff bought on impulse and forgotten about. A framework would have helped that person no end.
Sometimes being able to neatly label everything and put it in a box helps you to go out and find those more interesting things.
@ Carl – cheers for sharing. The Bogleheads spreadsheet looks really good.
@TA:
Great post.
I miss the free X-ray tool too!
Re: “My manual spreadsheet now gathers dust.”
A penny has just dropped for me re our various previous discussions about how [much] taxes matter or rather the use of a SIPP wrapper vs the slow & steady ISA assumption, see e.g.
https://monevator.com/the-slow-and-steady-passive-portfolio-update-q4-2020/
I had tacitly assumed you were using a bespoke spreadsheet.
I’m also a user of the Morningstar portfolio tool, and thanks for wrap-up. Forgive me for the basic functionality question, is it possible to track dividends/distributions (small as they might be!) that are not reinvested into the same holding? e.g. @ Accumulator, how will you account for the distributions from your Royal London short duration bond fund listed above? As far as I can tell, any kind of distribution is essentially ‘lost’ in terms of the morningstar returns calculations? Thanks!
@Aardvark
You may be able to find pension funds on trustnet. Trustnet had my pension funds, had to do a bit of digging to find the correct class comparing them to prices from my pension provider.
I use both Morningstar and Trustnet and they’re broadly similar. Their analysis tab does seem to give you most of what X-ray does as well. You can also compare to some more name brand indices than Morningstar’s categories.
@TA
What’s your reasoning to compare to FTSE All-Share and not something like Global Flex-Cap Equity? When I set up my portfolio on there picking a comparator was the hardest part!
@ young analyst – yes you can do that.
Go to the dividends page. Pick the holding you’re funnelling the dividend money towards and fill in the details.
This works as long as you know how much of your investment came from dividends as opposed to new contributions.
You do need to have invested in the holding before.
If a single investment is part new contrib, part divi then you’ll need to log each portion on separate pages of the Portfolio Manager.
For example, you might have invested £700 in an All-World ETF but some of that transaction was new contrib, and some divis paid by other funds.
Log the transaction like this:
£500 in All-World ETF on Transactions page. (Your ncw contrib money).
£200 in All-World ETF on Dividends page. (Your dividend money).
@ Kraftberk – agree on using the best of Trustnet and Morningstar. Re: FTSE All-Share. I picked it in the early days just because it was a familiar benchmark. I realised shortly after I should compare it against Global Large Cap benchmark but I’ve left it as is for consistency sake.
@TA. Many thanks! had never managed to get that to work!
@kraftberk (#21)
From memory, what I miss most about the free X-ray tool was its ability to drill down multiple levels, so by way of an example Vanguard Lifestyle funds were broken down below being comprised of a bunch of other Vanguard funds.
Do you (or anybody else, of course) know of a free X-Ray tool that does that level of drill down?
I keep everything in a spreadsheet. It does not track portfolio value, but that is not something I need. Should I need a historical record I can refer to old versions of the spreadsheet as I take a copy each year and on any significant changes in between. I also download and keep annual broker statements. Not something I have ever needed, but you never know.
One thing I need to do is apply fiddle factors to figure out net investable wealth. For example, we are heading towards LTA charges in our SIPPs at age 75, so I calculate an estimate as to what they might be, based on likely drawings and growth. I also value the SIPPs at 80% actual to take account of basic rate tax.
All a bit beyond an online portfolio tool.
Portfolio Manager is very slow isn’t it.
I’m a bit puzzled by this line in your post: “This snapshot lets you maintain a unified view of your investments. Especially handy if they’re diversified across multiple brokers.”
I don’t understand how you deal with having multiple brokers. If I have 1000 units in a fund at Broker A, and 500 in the same fund at Broker B… how do you handle that? If you create a different Portfolio for each broker, then you don’t get them combined in a single Snapshot – that’s a snapshot per-Portfolio.
Or do you mean you just have to enter 1500 units of the fund, and the tool knows nothing about the fact that’s combined between different brokers?
Such a timely post and the usual incredibly insightful comments stream
@Walsingham
Thank you!!! I knew I had seen an ISIN code somewhere on my workplace pension at some point – obviously it’s not accessible from the online tool, that would be way too easy, I have to click on the fund factsheet, get taken to another site, peruse a blurry PDF and find it written in really small text on page 3 – but at least I’ve found it, and the morningstar tool recognises it.
Now i can get back to working out what our current allocation is and how to fix it.
I’ve found both DC and DB workplace pensions incredibly poor with the data they provide, and ridiculously slow to respond to any request for information – weeks/months literally. Surely some ‘current allocation of your pension investments’ type of information should be absolutely basic in giving the investor some idea of current risk/volatility level they face.
My prediction: a market correction will hit a lot of private pension investors in their mid-late 50s just before retirement and they will say ‘i didn’t know I was invested in x – nobody told me’ – and the regulator will realise too late that cautious growth projections that they send out once a year are not sufficient information when people’s pots are relatively large and they are close to retirement – volatility/risk information becomes much more important!! I keep meaning to write to somebody about it!
@Al Cam
I just did a test on trustnet with a lifestrategy fund and it doesn’t go further than the top 10 holdings and associated asset allocation sadly. I’m not aware of any more but hopefully someone else is.
I trust regular contributor @ZXSpectrum48k is commemorating his hero Clive Sinclair whose death is reported tonight. Somewhere at the back of a drawer I think I still have one of the original calculators. Long long ago I knew a lady who worked for the Sinclair company, and she showed me how within the wiring was the option to press the right two keys simultaneously and display a profanity. Don’t remember what it was now, perhaps I should put some batteries in and try …
And I once met the great man, in slightly weird circumstances. I had returned to the UK after spending time in America, and stayed with a friend with a spare room until I sorted out my own accommodation. He had an invitation to a party, whose host – a lecturer in computing – I was acquainted with as well so he took me along. Sinclair was there, and not being a particularly gregarious person and not knowing the majority he took charge of the barbecue. So the sum of my exchanges with him was discussion about the relative merits of burgers and sausages.
@Jonathan B – well said. I also met with the great man at one of the many IT exhibitions in London during the mid-eighties when I was manning a stand for a company called Microvitec. I even got blanked by Alan Sugar when I tried to entice him onto the stand. All well before the IBM PC came along and ruined everything. Great times.
@ Al Cam – some platforms offer Instant X-Ray as part of their package – AJ Bell for instance. I’ve not found a replacement other than occasionally taking advantage of the free trial opportunity.
@ Fabius – yep, as per your second suggestion. If I’ve 1500 units diversified across two brokers, then I just input them into Portfolio Manager as a single block of 1500 units. I could additionally input them on Portfolio Manager as 2 extra, separate portfolios, but I can just go to my brokers for that view.
@ MatthewD – you can also find those hoary old pension funds on Trustnet. You’ll often be able to plot them against benchmarks or low cost trackers on their multi-plot charting tool.
@ Jonathan B – I had no idea. Shows how well my news app knows me. How wonderful that you met him. He was *the* icon of entrepreneurialism and British invention in the ’80s. I wonder what innovations he had in mind for the burgers 😉
I am sorry to say, but morningstar is no good either. Given that all clutter in our portfolio and one who is an immigrant, you’d end up with more than 1 country funds to track and manage—> Hence much needed excel sheet is the savior!
If UK is only the ask here, then I have tried trustnet, stonksfolio, FT.com to manage the portfolio, but none of them are sticky and ‘met’ the needs in UK. In India we have valuereasearchonline.com – just check out. It’s amazing – XIRR, multiple portfolios, in depth research on funds and what not.. all for free.
I’d love to make one for UK if I have a developer and website at hand!
Till then excel sheet wins even in UK. just pull price through scrapping .. what else we can do!
@TA, @kraftberk, @AnkurM:
Thanks guys – so like @naeclue – I will be sticking with my clunky old custom spreadsheet. Not for a moment implying these attributes apply to @naeclues spreadsheet – but they sure do apply to my collection of spreadsheets!
I used morningstar a while back but found trustnet to be better. following the above I returned to MS but it’s been very problematic. as in:
min 5 min to sign in
min 2 min to new screen
up to 5.min to refresh screen
Track and Edit screen inputs differ
The same with Chrome, Safari, & Firefox with only MS loaded no other sites
no cache, cookies, malware, et al
MS support from US , is us. Having supplied all paper evidence they suggest I
remove cookies. Having built my own PC’s I’m pc aware.
I’ve wasted so much time on this, so I give up.
Wow, I’m sorry to hear that Barney. Not surprised you’ve given up. It’s completely unusable on your machine at those speeds.
I forgot to mention, I tried MS.com, and everything works quite fast with a latency of 2 sec max but generally it’s instantaneous.
I was able to input Vanguard UK bond via it’s “ticker” isin number although they require price, date, etc for whatever reason it didn’t take I couldn’t bother to convert to $ so maybe thats the reason although it accepted my UK log-on ok.
Bottom line was to confirm that it’s a MS UK related problem. Their support is handled by whoever picks up your ticket, theres no continuity and as GBS noted “two nations separated by a common language”
@ Andrew Preston 7
“What I would also find useful is some kind of functionality whereby I could keep track of the geographical spread, and percentages”
You get that and more in Trustnet. 1st page shows £value 1mnt, 6 mnt, 1 yr
2nd page shows all funds & everything relevant. Then click for Asset allocation, then Detailed analysis and compare your portfolio across any number of index, and if you want it will compare risk exposure for each fund/trust held. And also a “Contribution analysis”
You can add Mrs Ps fund and follow that too.
Interactive Brokers has quite a powerful tool – which works quite well for anything on their platform.
A particularly nice feature is breaking down ETFs into the constituent stocks.
Unfortunately the ability to handle external accounts is basically broken. Inputting manually is somewhere between confusing and impossible. Bulk uploading a CSV is straight up impossible (even their example file fails).
I found Morningstar’s Portfolio Manager very slow, plus it didn’t have one of the funds I have.
So I tried the FT’s which seemed very nice initially but, having entered initial Buys, it doesn’t seem to show the quantity and value of each of my funds, only the total value of all ETFs and the total value of Managed Funds. I can’t see a way to view my holdings of each fund. Most strange.
Then I tried Trustnet, at @Barney’s suggestion. Having made an account I tried to create a new Portfolio, only to get “Server Error in ‘/’ Application.” Now I get that error page every time I click “Portfolio” in the site menu!
I’m amazed there aren’t several *good* options around.
@Fabius: That may be a problem at either end. If it’s Trustnet they will get it corrected, but it may be at your end. If it’s Chrome, hit the three vertical spots top right hand side of browser, go to settings, click on “clear browsing history”
close browser. Then clear all cookies and cache from your pc. If it’s a mac, with the desk top showing =Finder, click Go click Library click the “cache” file highlight all and right click and delete. go back to library and do the same for “cookie”,”Launch Agents”, and “Saved Application State” shut down Chrome and restart. That should take you 7 min max unless you have a few gb in the deleted files, in which case you will benefit with a bit more disk space.
Again, if its a mac back up with time machine first. Basically same with windows.
Also, email Trustnet they will reply although you can also phone them up.
Best
BB
Thanks @Barney but it was definitely a problem at their end – it was a standard-looking ASP error page. It did go away – I got to see the Portfolio page – but every time I tried to do something I got the error. Each thing I tried to do, like adding an amount of a fund, succeeded – I could eventually see it – but encountering the error every time made it too slow progress.
I use Sharesight as well (currently on their expert plan -£20/month) and for me it has been worth every penny. They’re also talking about adding a UK CGT report which would be an added bonus.
Sharesight does look promising, especially as I can squeeze into the free tier. A bonus of simplifying my holdings recently! Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to include several of the funds I have, which aren’t particularly obscure. e.g. it doesn’t have Vanguard U.K. Government Bond Index Fund GBP Acc (IE00B1S75374). Unless I’m doing something wrong?
Unfortunately Morningstar has lost the plot. It’s portfolio manager is now totally unreliable. I can log in then it freezes. MS seems to have no timetable for fixing these problems.
The Morningstar portfolio tool doesn’t seem to work for me. I see they are describing it as “legacy”.
Been using Morningstar portfolio for a few years. Could be great but is pretty neglected. On one portfolio they couldn’t even calculate weighting correctly (fortunately the figures were ludicrous rather than mildly misleading). They took months to address when I reported it.
I agree with others above that it’s become increasingly unreliable. I could access one portfolio last week but not two others which gave server errors.
The 12 month trailing return chart stopped working for me a few weeks ago and shows no sign of returning (might just be unlucky on that one).
But I now feel uncomfortable relying on it in any way. Even premium feature links, just give an error most of the time. Strikes me as abandoned.
I’ve now built a simple macro to be able to copy and paste and then reformat my entered transactions as a backup. These date back over at least 3 different broker platforms and would be very tricky to completely recover otherwise (and export is a premium feature).
It’s a shame this is also so half-baked and reliable as I would actually pay for it (a rarity for for me 🙂 ) because I’ve used some of the xray features on ii. Not perfect but certainly helpful.
On ii however they don’t allow bringing together of a view across General Trading, ISA and SIPP.
The Watchlist feature on ii could also be great as you can enter a real or fantasy portfolio on there and then do analysis. So you can, for example, enter all holdings across three account types and perhaps those of a partner. Unfortunately it’s poorly thought out and limited. You can enter a holding but not dated transactions. So there’s no actual (“personal” in Morningstar parlance; money-weighted?) view.
Then if you’ve entered a holding, you can’t edit it. You can only delete and re-enter.
But it does at least allow some testing of portfolio ideas to check exposure to geography, sector allocations etc and performance. Bizarrely difficult/impossible to use at times however (especially for trying to compare a portfolio to an index).
Now if only modern technology allowed regulators to mandate that all fund companies had to make data freely available through feeds in a common open format, we could have open source tools to do all this stuff. Oh wait…
If it’s any consolation Stuart, my portfolio in Morningstar Portfolio free version is back, but I can’t for the life of me understand the methodology behind the personal return lines under the performance tab.
Perhaps Monevator could do an updated piece on portfolio tracking tools?
@William – it seems increasingly hit and miss. Mostly I get a long wait and then a 504 error.
I’m not too sure about Personal Return either. I think I understand what it’s supposed to be. Total Return is if you’d held the porfolio you hold since the start of the chart period. Personal Return should be the same if you did hold it and haven’t touched it. If you’ve bought or sold, it may be better or worse. Now why they choose to display that as a bar chart rather than a line beats me since it just makes comparison mostly impossible.
If anyone’s interested, I can make available a simple macro to help get your transactions out of Morningstar (or rather just paste and format them once you’ve copied). It’ll probably just be text that you have to create as a macro yourself in Excel. This is due to concerns over making available a macro-enabled workbook (I’m not dodgy, but if I were, I would say that wouldn’t I? ;-))
Trustnet’s portfolio tool is similar to Morningstar’s. I think it’s laborious to use and wouldn’t say it’s better other than it’s working (although very very slow at times), but worth a look if seeking alternatives.
For the DIY crowd, here’s a source of spreadsheets doing all sorts of clever stuff. CAVEAT – there are a lot of macro-enabled workbooks and although I have no reason to believe there’s anything wrong, caution is advised.
https://investexcel.net
I’m not sure if there is a portfolio tracker per se (the article gives enough good options above anyway), but there may be bits to achieve certain things.
The one I’ve used is: https://investexcel.net/multiple-stock-quote-downloader-for-excel/
which downloads historical prices for an entered set of securities (provided they are available on Yahoo! Finance).
@ Stuart – thank you very much for your helpful comment on this.
Morningstar’s personal return is the money-weighted return taking into account the timing of portfolio contributions and withdrawals. This post has more:
https://monevator.com/portfolio-tracking-how-to-track-your-investments-using-a-money-weighted-return/
Total return is the unitised, time-weighted return that strips out the impact of cashflows:
https://monevator.com/how-to-unitize-your-portfolio/
With my sons help I have been playing around with google sheets as an alternative to Morningstar which is now unusable. The google finance function works well with shares and ETFs, but funds are more of a faff and need the XPATH command to capture the number from a website. It doesn’t seem very stable and definitely more use for the nerd end of the spectrum.
@All. Update: Iv’e since returned to Morningstar portfolio tracking, and phoned them every time I encountered problems, resulting in a staff member accessing my mac to correct and advise. And the response times are ok. The tools as advised by TA are ok too. I think that you get a helluva lot for free. But if like me you experience problems, let them know, they have email contact, and they do respond. Regarding ex-ray, this is available on AJ Bell, where you can also add or try a hypothetical portfolio which Morningstar charge £14 per month for access. I’d even consider £2k investment with AJB (£7 per year) to have access to their ex-ray.
I forgot to add that Int Inv also have Morningstar ex-ray facility.