What caught my eye this week.
A fortnight ago I posted a couple of reader polls, asking you how often – and how – you checked up on your investment portfolio.
More than 2,600 of you voted! Thanks to everyone who did their click for England Monevator.
I promised to share the results. They might be especially interesting to those who check their portfolios less frequently.
(Because presumably you aren’t the sort to go back to the original article after a week to see how everyone else voted…)
How often is normal
The first big takeaway is that over half of Monevator readers (yes, who voted in this poll, statistic sticklers) check their portfolio at least once a week:
Indeed slightly more than 80% of us check our portfolios at least monthly!
This is a pretty incredible statistic. I’m hoping my co-blogger The Accumulator doesn’t read it, given how often he’s cautioned against fanatical portfolio monitoring.
Of course it’s reasonable to assume that regular Monevator readers are more engaged with their portfolios than most private investors. And also perhaps that the sort who will vote in a poll that’s of interest to investing nerds like us are also, well, investing nerds who are more likely to want to see how their portfolios are doing.
There’s no distinguishing between passive and naughty active investors here, either. Despite some friction at times, we do try to be a broad church.
Maybe most of Team Accumulator just smiled serenely on seeing the polls then glided down to the latest Guardian fancy house roundup in the weekly links?
Certainly my friends who invest completely passively (and where I’ve had something to do with it, which is how I know) typically have no idea what their portfolio is worth.
At least a couple have called me over the years to make sense of their platform’s online navigation. Up until then they’d mostly done everything by post!
Who does that now? To some extent the accessibility of our portfolios via the devices that surround us makes checking them regularly almost inevitable.
Check mate
If you had to phone up a person to ask for a snapshot – let alone wait for a reply in the mail – I doubt anyone would be checking anything very often.
But then again, I would never have invested so much and so young if it hadn’t been a hands-on experience. And I’m obviously an (over) engaged investor as a result who has achieved a measure of financial security pretty young as a result.
I’m sure I’ve invested more (and more often) because I check my portfolio at least daily. Indeed far more often at times, with it being so easily accessible via various sheets on my Google Drive net worth spreadsheet.
However I also do believe this has caused me more stress and hurt than even active investing had to. Particularly in a dire year like 2022 (dire at least for a naughty small cap / growth stock-leaning active investor like me.)
Tools of the trade(rs)
I am almost more surprised that so few of you use an automatically updated spreadsheet like I do. Our second poll suggests nearly 40% of you are trudging around the broker screens, which seems a faff to me:
One thing is clear – paper is indeed a dying medium for investors.
Meanwhile I’m impressed that c. 35 of you don’t track your portfolio at all. Is that because it’s size is so surplus to requirements or because you’re just getting started, I wonder?
It feels like one definition of being really rich: if you have to ask the price you’re not rich. Maybe it’s the same for sufficiently (eight-figure?) funded stashes.
I’ll let you know if I ever get there…
Portfolio monitoring pros and cons
It’s been a truism for as long as I’ve been blogging about personal finance that a largely hands-off approach to your portfolio will work best for most investors.
Choose a sound asset allocation, automate your saving and investing, and avoid checking things too often.
There was even that famous study that apparently showed that dead investors – who were unable to log into their dormant accounts to meddle – achieved the highest returns of all.
Interestingly, in reading around the subject I’ve found new research implying that being engaged leads to superior outcomes. Although of course it depends on what that engagement entails.
Trading penny stocks based on candlestick charts every morning is almost certainly not going to be a winning strategy, however engaged you are.
On the other hand, caring enough to log into your company’s pension portal to swap high-charging active funds for low-cost index trackers is a one-shot decision that will likely reap rewards for decades.
On balance, I still feel less is probably more. However bad I am at taking such advice myself.
That’s because staying strategically disengaged from your portfolio’s value most of the time has two big benefits.
Firstly you’ll be less tempted to fiddle with your plan or panic.
Secondly, every portfolio except Bernie Madoff’s spends most of its time below its latest high-water mark. Seeing you’re down (even if only on yesterday) makes you feel bad.
The science says the times you notice you’re up won’t balance it out, either. The pain of losses exceeds the joy of gains.
But you probably know that already. And I must admit that as a passionate investor who follows the markets like others football – not to mention a blog owner who hopes you’ll keep returning or better yet subscribe to read more of our articles – I’m glad so many of you are so fresh with your investments.
Just don’t tell the other guy!
Have a great weekend.
From Monevator
Are you lost in Neverland? Fear of investing is a familiar and costly story – Monevator
From the archive-ator: When to buy insurance – Monevator
News
Note: Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view click through to read the article. Try privacy/incognito mode to avoid cookies. Consider subscribing to sites you visit a lot.
UK inflation dropped slightly to 10.5% in December… – Investment Week
…and energy bills are forecast to fall further later this year – City AM
Employers confronted over missing pension contributions [Search result] – FT
Only two weeks to go until 31 January self-assessment tax deadline – LITRG
Lloyds and Halifax to close 40 more bank branches in England and Wales – Guardian
Changes to state pension top-ups come into force from April – Which
Amazon is shutting down its AmazonSmile charity initiative – Amazon
Super passive goes ballistic; active is atrocious [Search result] – FT
Products and services
Hargreaves Lansdown launches electronic voting system – Investment Week
Could your savings earn a higher interest rate without you switching bank? – This Is Money
UK inflation: how everyday goods and services have shot up in price – Guardian
Open a SIPP with Interactive Investor and pay no SIPP fee for six months. Terms apply – Interactive Investor
How to earn rewards and freebies from your current account – Be Clever With Your Cash
The psychology of scams: how fraudsters trick their victims – Which
Cost of a basic funeral dips below £4,000 – This Is Money
Homes with storage to cut clutter, in pictures – Guardian
Comment and opinion
$1 trillion and counting: Jack Bogle’s legacy to investors – The Evidence-based Investor
Elevate – Banker on FIRE
Financial planning in your 20s is about setting up good habits – Oblivious Investor
FOMO: the worst financial trait – Morgan Housel
Five lessons from an awful year for the financial markets – A Wealth of Common Sense
Don’t bet the bank – Humble Dollar
The role of [US] real estate in an investment portfolio – Morningstar
Don’t buy a football club – The Motley Fool
Who pays for your credit card rewards? [US but relevant] – Vox
Long-term investing maths mini-special
The most important equation (or why Bitcoin has to average 30% a year to break even with the S&P 500) – Klement on Investing
The long-term wins – A Wealth of Common Sense
Naughty corner: Active antics
The periodic table of commodity returns: 2013-2022 [Infographic] – Visual Capitalist
Time to buy UK small-caps? [Search result] – FT
Why hedge funds prefer higher interest rates – Institutional Investor
Should we listen to outperforming fund managers? – Behavioural Investment
Warren’s Way – Humble Dollar
Questioning the illiquidity premium – Fiduciary Wealth Partners [h/t Abnormal Returns]
Kindle book bargains
What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson – £0.99 on Kindle
The Investment Trusts Handbook 2023 by Jonathan Davis et al – Free on Kindle
Stuffocation: Living More With Less by James Wallman – £0.99 on Kindle
Factfulness: Ten Reasons…Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling – £0.99 on Kindle
Environmental factors
It’s getting too hot to make snow – Wired
Invest in technology that removes CO2, says UN report – BBC
EVs: mini power plants on wheels – Wired
‘Super-tipping points’ could trigger cascade of climate progress – Guardian
Off our beat
What it’s like to be @Josh on Instagram – Slate
Why the US and UK can’t stop fighting the metric system – The Verge
“The more we pulled back the carpet, the more we saw” – Guardian
Job interviews are a nightmare, and only getting worse – Vox
And finally…
“The impression was gaining ground with me that it was a good thing to let the money be my slave and not make myself a slave to money..”
– John D. Rockefeller, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
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I’d love to use an auto updating spreadsheet, but don’t know where to start. Future article? Template for subscribers?
@Martin T. It’s reasonably straightforward if all you want is current value and don’t have any OEICs. Look at https://sheetsformarketers.com/how-to-get-stock-prices-in-google-sheets/ to get current prices, multiply by your current no of shares, and you’re there.
I believe in Google Sheets the only way to get OEIC prices is to do some web scraping, which is fiddlier, but googleable.
Worst case is things like pension valuations if they aren’t in listed funds. I’ve had some horrible bodge solutions there in the past, but right now I accept I have to update those manually.
My format-might be some practical use ?-run successfully for many many years
1) A Quicken 2004 program running on a standalone (no internet) Windows XP computer for day to day finances-ie entering current account,visa and investment portfolio (SIPPs and ISAs) etc as required
The Quicken home page gives an instant up to date summation of our total financial position at all times-useful for keeping a partner in the loop who may only be accessing Quicken occasionally to enter their visa /current purchases but are not interested in running investments as such
(I believe old copies of Quicken can still be bought as can cheap second hand computers to run Windows XP only)
(As a personal finance programme I think Quicken has not been bested yet)
2) I also run in tandem a Trustnet dummy portfolio on an iPad with my investment portfolio entered – this enables me to update my fund prices automatically
I can know at any time from Trustnet what my portfolio is doing-if needed
Enter updated fund unit prices into Quicken as often as required from Trustnet
(I only have 3 index funds only in my portfolio which makes life very easy)
xxd09
Why scrape? Yahoo Finance has a good API, which I use to populate my spreadsheet.
For example:
https://query1.finance.yahoo.com/v7/finance/download/0P00013P6J.L?period1=1673568000&period2=1798675200&interval=1d&events=history&includeAdjustedClose=true
period1 is start time, given as an epoch timestamp (number of seconds since the 1st of January 1970). Here set to the 13th of Jan, 2023
period2 is the end time – here set to 31st of Dec 2026, so I don’t have to update the URL for 3 years.
the first parameter is the “fund code” – can be found by searching on https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/0P00013P6J.L
It’s enough to know I don’t have enough. The actual balances won’t matter for decades.
That said, I love a bit of automation! Snowed in this weekend so spreadsheeting could nice time killer, thanks @xeny.
On the how often you check matter I want to mention the awkward “compliance” department that made me write to a broker to get them to send me quarterly letters I could show recording that I had, again, done no trades with that account. And there was more stupidity where that came from.
The difficulty with automating broker downloads / APIs is having to update these every year or so when their own websites break the workflows you put into place.
I don’t trust the current Open Banking and aggregation tools available from a privacy perspective so I’m afraid it’s logging in and eyeballing for now.
I do have automation setup for things like exchange rates given I invest across five currencies. I also think the friction of having to do things manually also discourages frequent monitoring. But, YMMV.
Thanks for the suggestions – should keep me busy on a rainy day!! Has anyone successfully automated a Libre Office ss? Or is it possible to convert that to Google sheets without starting from scratch, please? Sorry, but I’m at the limit of my self-taught ability!
I’m also really surprised more people don’t set up an automated (or semi-automated if you have a few weird holdings) Google spreadsheet, especially if you hold only ETFs and stocks – mutual funds may be harder, I don’t know.
In case people are interested, the starting point is to get Google to input the current price of the fund/stock/etc. So for the current price of my iShares Core MSCI Emerging Markets IMI UCITS ETF I enter the following formula:
=GOOGLEFINANCE(“LON:EMIM”, “price”)/100
(Note the dividing by 100 is to return the result in pounds rather than pence. You do have to check things like this, also some of my funds are denominated in USD so I have to input the exchange rate in a different cell by using =GOOGLEFINANCE(“CURRENCY:GBPUSD”) and divide by that).
Once you’ve done that you just input the amount of shares, units etc you hold and multiply them. It’s also fairly easy to do things like calculate the proportion of a holding to total value vs the desired proportion, set rebalancing thresholds, input TERs and compare costs etc.
Of course, as @TI says the optimal thing is to do what my wife does – which is none of the above, she only finds out the value of her portfolio when the platform sends her their annual letter…
If there is an article about automating your manual spreadsheet for obvious funds like SMT, VUSA, EQQQ, Fundsmith Eq I Acc etc, then could we also include how to pull down the Top10 Holdings of each fund/ETF ??
Kudos for the ft ‘sun-esque’ Mary Poppins inspired headline. Also the one suggested in the comments of that article about equities and bonds moving in lockstep ‘correlation street’
“Super passive goes ballistic; active is atrocious”
I’m not a fan of football, but I will always that Sun sports headline:
Super Cali go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious.
On the automation, I was previously cut and pasting from a google sheet that was pulling investment prices automatically (using the googlefinance function) then pasting them into my libreoffice sheet. Only worked for products with tickers though not funds. So I was having to manually look those up and add them.
Off the back of the other MV article where people were discussing this a few weeks back, I’ve just switched to using a HL watchlist, which I just download once a month. This isn’t limited to tickers, plus you get an additional .csv with the data once a month for your records. I think this is a better method, but that said, have only done it once so far..
Presumably 35 don’t check portfolio at all rather than 350. (Or 26000 replied to poll, or % was 13.3 rather than 1.33, or my maths is out)
Previous comment referred to the “track” stats rather than “check”.
Shame about the AmazonSmile initiative no longer continuing. I used to feel less guilty about buying stuff because of the small donation being made.
Adding to previous suggestions, this code in a Google doc pulls the price of a fund listed on HL (where their format is in pence, eg “29200.00p”) through:
=value(SUBSTITUTE(query(IMPORTXML(A1,”//span[@class=’bid price-divide’]”),”select* limit 1″,0),”p”,””,1))
Where cell A1 contains the URL for the relevant fund, eg:
https://www.hl.co.uk/funds/fund-discounts,-prices–and–factsheets/search-results/v/vanguard-lifestrategy-100-equity-accumulation
Can sometimes take a moment to update, and obviously you are dependent on HL to show an up to date price.
Here’s a feed for HSBC FTSE All World, I use on my Google Sheet, its taken from Charles Stanley.
=(SUBSTITUTE(IMPORTXML(“https://www.charles-stanley-direct.co.uk/ViewFund?Sedol=BMJJJF9&Isin=GB00BMJJJF91&PreviousSearchResults=%2FInvestmentSearch%2FSearch%3FSearchText%3Dhsbc%2520ftse%2520all%2520world”, “//div[@class=’fund-summary ‘] //li[2]//span”),”GBX”,””,1)/100)
strips out the GBX
I’d need to log into my accounts to see the number of units I have, so noting the current value (rather than using semi-automated) is no hardship. Semi-automation is no real benefit AFAICS but always fun to tinker with a spreadsheet.
Monevator got a mention on the FT Money Clinic podcast – the comparison table of costs/fees.
I am with interactive investor, so sometimes logon to see how things look, especially when divis have been paid. When they have I just update portfolio on google finance, easy peasy to do . We only have six investment trusts so works for us, not for funds though!
I found FT.COM to be the most consistent HTML format and reliable website for scraping data from. Consistent across Funds, ETFs, Investment Trusts and Shares. Makes it easier when scraping a variety of equity types.
I’ve been using Moneyhub (open banking app/web) for the last few months, initially for tracking income and spending, however I soon realised you can add pretty much anything to build out the net worth picture too. I’ve managed to link all my investment accounts including my company pension with L&G. It’ll value your property via Zoopla too if you like (else add a manual record). I think you can still try it free for six months then £14.99 a year after that. They don’t sell your data unlike many of the other offerings, hence the fee I guess. I realise some will not want to give up that much (read only) access. I’m just about ok with it (until they get hacked!)
I still manually update my old spreadsheet on a monthly basis, but I’m finding Moneyhub is helping me scratch the more frequent itch without all the multi-login hassle. Best one I’ve found – might be worth a try.
A barrier to automation for me looks to be automatic dividend reinvestments, since with only automatic updating of prices, it seems that the number of units held would need to be updated every time and that seems like it would be as much faff as just getting the overall value from the account manager. Or do people have a way to automate that part too? Or does it require using services that get permission to access your accounts (which I’m uneasy with)?
I am someone in my first year of my investment journey so might be easier to collect the numbers than for some of the more seasoned people, but for people asking for automatic spreadsheets I have had a lot of success with this, hopefully it can help someone here as well: https://guide.cspersonalfinance.io/
@all — Cheers for all the great spreadsheet insights and tips, as well as other comments! I use Google Drive and 99% of my portfolio is stock tickers, but where it’s not I have had mixed luck with scraping over the years and have often reverted to occasional check and type-ins. Another issue (probably very sane on the part of everyone involved, security-wise!) is Open Banking isn’t supported by these spreadsheets, so you still have to log into bank accounts or other platforms to get certain data. Can’t see that lasting forever though. I’ll think about how to do a public version of my spreadsheet and writing a post about it in the future. I’m no spreadsheet whiz though (it’s not super nicely colour coded like many you see, no drop-downs or forced ranges or whatever). Very much my own animal!
Just a few replies on some of the other points raised:
@Fatbritabroad @MarkR — Indeed, I immediately messaged @TA with the headline, full of envy. 😉
@Andrew — Of course you’re quite right. This is why I shouldn’t post Weekend Reading late on Friday nights! Will amend in a mo. Ta!
@Weenie — Yes it did feel like the easiest way in the world to do a tiny bit of good in your everyday life. Very few people seemed to trust it or thought they’d pay more or similar. I guess Amazon decided that was adding too much friction to the decision machine, unfortunately.
@Ade — Interesting. I was quite deeply into one of these apps a while back that got effectively discontinued (certainly to the point where I didn’t trust it anymore) but if something did literally *everything* I might consider transitioning. Okay no I wouldn’t, I love my spreadsheet, but pulling in those non-investment platform data like Zoopla is impressive.
@PeterW — Yes anything like that I update manually. To be honest I trade so much I tend to breeze through most accounts fairly regularly anyway. With that said I’m not the greatest fan of automatic dividend reinvestment so that wouldn’t come up for me. (I’m all for reinvesting dividends, it’s the automatic bit I don’t love. Fully understand it’s sometimes very cost-effective and might often be seen as the best use of cash. But for me often it won’t be.)
Cheers everyone, hope the sun is making up for the ice this Sunday where you are!
@Portly Gent — Thanks so much for flagging up the mention, I hadn’t got around to this podcast yet and it made our day to get the mention! 🙂
I can strongly recommend the TrustNet website, which has a Portfolio section which has a number of powerful features to it.
A word on data security from a dinosaur. I consider putting my net worth onto a Google sheet a security risk too far. There is no facility for user controlled encryption last I looked. Perhaps a third party tool can be involved. Perhaps a simple watch list could be established without giving much away. I prefer my data to be encrypted under my own control in one local spreadsheet with encrypted backups. The risk for me is both with the client side and cloud server side. All the Google ‘apps’ connect waaaay too much personal life data in one cloud behind one password for my liking (albeit with 2FA for client; I have no idea about the protocol from the Google side but I certainly know this is outside of my control and could be changed, scraped or abused without my permission or notification, especially given that nobody reads or can understand EULAs).
Some neat tricks in the comments and I especially like the use of the Yahoo! API.
I use the Yahoo! watchlists feature, which includes the ability to record holdings etc. A bit manual, but works well for me once setup given I don’t tend to dabble too often. Just a few clicks (or touches of the mobile app) a day lets me see the big gainers and losers, which then might lead me to investigate a bit deeper for the few single stocks and sector ETFs that I still own.
Most of my portfolio is now ultra-passive (HSBC FTSE All-World), so I don’t bother with the daily valuation unless I’m looking for an opportunity to top-up. Even then, I tend towards ‘time in the market’ instead of ‘timing the market’ as funds become available.
But old habits die hard.
I much prefer a manual quarterly update as I can see what has happened since the last update. I then check to 12 month H/L and to my original investment thesis to see if I want to do anything. I feel that I might miss part of the journey if everything was automated.
I had a little taster this weekend of what the Monevator team are up against. My copy of that august journal, the Hargreaves Lansdown Investment Times landed on my doormat. There’s an article on passive v active investing in the US. I wondered what slant it might take, given that this must be the most open and shut case out there. This is a direct quote from the article:
“Investing using a passive fund means your investment will track the market. But tracker funds tend to underperform when you take things like transaction costs and management fees into account. Unlike tracker funds, in turbulent times, an actively managed fund can make market calls which try to lessen the impact of volatility. They can actively avoid stocks that could be impacted most by events, or find stocks that could benefit from that economic climate. So, your investment could reduce less in value, or do better than the index”
A few paragraphs later it alerts me to the new HL US Fund. It has the advantage of only having existed for two months, so hasn’t really had a fair opportunity to underperform its index yet, but given that it appears to be a “Fund of Funds”, it is likely to underperform the underperformers. The fee is officially 0.83%. HL also offers the L&G Index fund at 0.05%, but frankly who would buy that after reading that article and nothing else?
The foreword proudly announces that Investment Times is sent to more than half a million UK households (so I imagine nearer a million actual investors).
Please keep banging the passive drum @TI and @TA- both do a fantastic job, but I wince at the enormity of the task still ahead!!
Thanks everyone for all those tricks to access data online. I have never been a big fan of spreadsheets myself though and have been for some time considering converting my master spreadsheet into a Python Jupiter notebook. If anyone does their portfolio analysis using Python, I would be interested to know the process they follow and any neat tricks they have come across. I’m also thinking about combining that with R for statistical analysis.
@ TI – I heard the Monevator website being recommended this week on the FT Money podcast. Well deserved. Congratulations!
I was using Excel extensively with share prices automated using Stock Market Functions add-in but it was just too much of a time drain for me storing multiples of essential the same data point. Now I just use it for a snapshot on shares. I do like the SMF add-in, been using it for over 10 years, sadly to maintainer died recently, the community has been in touch with the estate, it looks like the user community is taking on maintaining it.
For an overall historic picture data wise I went for keeping it simple, I use MS Money for day to day transactions which gets exported as csv’s, everything else I store in individual comma delimited files – share transactions, dividends, DC pension transactions, fund prices, share plan schemes. I use JupyterLab with python/pyspark to update my master datasets using the source csvs which I store the final joined data in delta format. Share prices / exchange rates come from yahoo finance using yfinance python package. For presentation I use Power BI Desktop, can do some good interactive dashboards and with it’s large userbase you can usually find examples for what you’re trying to do.
I use the free portfolio function at Morningstar. The site is prone to hiccups, and occasional long pauses, but overall it’s very useful for me. Otherwise, I just check at the platforms. Cannot be bothered with spreadsheets etc.
I pay about £100 a year for an Excel add-on that gets all the prices for the 20-odd ETFs and Funds I hold. I find it invaluable, though it probably just uses one of the techniques used in other posts so could be replicated by someone who knows what they’re doing.
https://www.excelpricefeed.com.
Had no idea =GOOGLEFINANCE() existed until this week. Neat.
A sort-of tip for compulsive checkers: =ROUND(??,-3) to hide smaller movements. Substitute -3 for your own preferred order of magnitude.
I am honestly surprised no one has yet mentioned the excellent Portfolio Performance tool (https://www.portfolio-performance.info/en/) it’s open source has been around for years and is developed by an active community of (mostly) German speaking developers. Takes a bit to get used to in the beginning but pulls in all the market data, it can read a bunch of pdf statements from brokers to get transactions and comes with a lot of handy analytics. I’m sure I’m only using 20% of its abilities, but it’s a great help to see across multiple portfolios and their contents in a consolidated view.
@Valiant
I use Excel and it has an inbuilt feature (as part of an MS 365 subscription) that gets data from Refinitiv. You might already know this but it works for me without any additional third-party add-in/fee required.
I see others are using Google sheets for similar functionality which I assume is free. I’d be interested if any of the spreadsheet nerds/specialists think that Excel isn’t worth it? (Currently my MS 365 subscription is 65.00 (EUR) per month which includes all the usual plus cloud storage.)
Thanks for your post TI. Some interesting results there for sure. I myself check once per month but only because I manually invest still. I record the value just for plotting my FI Fund pot graph.
Thanks so much as well for linking that article about the manual national insurance contributions. I advised my father to purchase all the years he didn’t qualify as it just seemed like the best investment you could make, guaranteed returns after only a few years of claiming his pension. I will inform him of how lucky he was as he retires soon and bought many many years.
TFJ
I’m a big fan of the DFS “Saver Sessions” as I have an EV, a large (19kWh) house battery, and I’ve read the documents on the algorithm used to work out your baseline for establishing what you save in the sessions.
The last one I have data for is the 23rd and I saved 12kWh earning me £40 gross and £30 after deducting cost of me using energy in peak times to establish a high baseline versus in my cheap overnight off peak.
Our electric bill was close to zero for December despite very little solar and I expect that January and February will see us making a healthy profit.
I’m not sure this is exactly how they intended it to work, but I am shifting our demand and making a tidy profit.
And that hit the wrong article! Off to find the right one.