I’m pretty sure this has been discussed here before, but I can’t seem to find the thread so I’m going to bring it up again: can you recommend a website or application that will help me manage my personal investments? I don’t need anything particularly fancy, I just want something that will help me monitor performance and asset allocation. I’ve been doing it myself in an Excel spreadsheet for a long time, but ever since I added my wife’s accounts it’s gone from being fun to update to being a pain in the ass. The main annoyance is manually updating the holdings, so something that would automatically pull positions from Fidelity and Vanguard would be a huge benefit. Any recommendations?
Yodlee invented account aggregation. Google that for other similar services. Most are B2B however. You might want to check your current broker to see if they support such a system. (E.g., Wachovia gives you yodlee for free.)
Is this for your own investments, or are you managing money for other people? I took a look at betterinvesting’s portfolio manager 5 (google it) and was impressed with what they had. Investments nicely broken down into income and capital growth components, target vs. actual allocations by asset class and industry. Not too expensive. The only strike against it was that it couldn’t handle short sales, but if you’re not doing that, it should be great. I was looking to run a paper long-short fund, so the no-shorts constraint was a killer for me. Still haven’t found a good solution, and would be interested in what you ultimately choose. There used to be a portfolio management program called Captools which evidently lots of people loved, but then the company took away the individual edition and replaced it with something 10x more expensive for institutions (presumably because institutions were using the personal edition for themselves). So maybe look on Google for what people are using to replace Captools to get some ideas.
I was struggling with this same issue. Especially because I got an IRA, Roth, 401K, brokerage, and ESOP accounts. It is doubled because I am married too. I settled with the portfolio manager on MSN Money. It doesnt have the asset classes, but it does allow you to open many different accounts and to track transactions. It calculates the ROR for each of them. The price is right too…free. It isnt the best. I still have to import it into excel for asset allocation work. But that is find since my classification probably differs from the stated.
I just started using Tradelog and am very happy. However, it’s just a tax lot management system, it’s not a complete solution like you’re looking for.
I think the betterinvesting product can handle a few different types of accounts simultaneously… it’s probably not suitable for managing more than about 10 or so, though. With MSN Money, it’s hard to argue against free. I liked the reports that betterinvesting produced… I just wish it could handle short sales, but I think the sponsoring organization doesn’t want to encourage their users to short things (though it might allow futures shorting). I bought XLQ as a data tool for getting historical data into Excel, and it does a nice job of it for around $80. I noticed it comes with a nice template for portfolio management, and has a 45 day full function demo. A google search on XLQ should get you there if interested.