I have always used excel to manage my personal portfolio, but have you guys ever used programs such as Quicken Premier or other personal portfolio management software packages? I am thinking about getting an investment management softward package becuase I manage a few other portfolio for family members and it is getting to be a bit difficult and time consuming by using downloads from brokerage firms and having to manipulate the data in excel. I’d be interested in your thoughts.
How complex is your portfolio? (short positions? derivatives?)
If you’re just long-only, stocks, bonds and ETFs, there are a number of solutions. The American Association of Individual Investors does a periodic review of them, and it’s probably worth trying to get a copy of whatever the latest version is.
I actually ended up writing up a bunch of software tools in R to work with mine. It’s not as pretty as the commercial packages, but it helps me track the things I find important. I don’t recommend this approach unless you really enjoy programming and/or have specific analyses that you really want to do. I started because I wanted to be able to answer some questions quickly for my clients, but once I got started, the “hey, let me get it to do X as well” bug bit me and it turned into a nice status and backtesting tool.
I had created a few programs in VBA to do what I wanted, but it is still a pain to have to go and download the reports from the brokerage firm and have to export them to excel. I pretty much just want a program that will easily spit out holdings and trasactions reports into excel from one place. I use Charles Schwab, and they do not do a very good job about geting historical data from their website.
So you want a commercial software package that will connect to your broker and deal with the downloading carp from Schwab so you don’t have to, is that what you’re getting at (plus get better historical price data)?
This might help:
http://www.aaii.com/computerizedinvesting/article/the-top-portfolio-management-software
I also remember liking this one (but not enough to buy it and learn it fully at the time):
http://www.investmentaccountmanager.com/portfolio-manager.php
Cool, I just didn’t know if buying one of these packages would be overkill and are pretty much designed for people that don’t know how to use excel. But I do find it hard to get good historical data such as holdings and market values from Schwab, which would be a plus to getting a program such as quicken premier…I think.
If you’re doing portfolios for a bunch of people, paying $150 or so to make your life easier seems like a good deal to me (assuming that the software does what you need it to).
bchad any recommendations on software for tracking options positions like covered calls?
Nothing comes to mind. Options tracking software is kinda specialized. I haven’t seen any retail-like stuff that can do it, but I also haven’t looked in a while, so maybe some things have added that feature.
So, I got quicken premier and I am kind of disappointed as it doesnt dowload historical bond prices from my custodian. I had to go in an manually enter the bond prices, which I only did for several quarter ends. Plus a lot of my cost basis wasnt downloaded. I am kind of disappointed but hopefully it will be helpful going forward after I manually input the missing data.