Beginner alert: What portfolio software do you use to keep track?

barginboyrob

I'm looking to get into buying some shares but was wondering :

1. Which broker do you use? Are all of them roughly £10 per transaction, is there anything to look out for..I'm thinking of doing everything with iii.

2. Does everyone have any software to keep track of the shares they own, or programs to help make investment decisions (i'm not sure but I assume you can get programs which will show a massive list of listed companies and the various ratios you can compare them by etc)

Porcupine

I haven't been paying attention recently, but I think there are some brokers who have lower dealing costs but aggregrate buy orders. That means the buy order may be on a predetermined date rather than realtime. The Motley Fool Sharebuilder (on the Halifax platform) is like this. Selling is realtime and costs the same as a normal deal.

I'm not sure about software, but there are quite a few websites giving data. The websites provide their own data, while for software on your own PC I imagine you have to subscribe to a data feed (since these are aimed at investment companies, they aren't cheap).

I quite like MoneyExtra for the portfolio manager (which have a good feed of UK fund data that many US sites don't have, as well as the ability to input past transactions and work out profit/loss).

For selecting funds based on various stats I use MorningStar and TrustNet. I'm not sure if they do individual shares too.

Yahoo Finance also provides some free downloadable data... not on UK funds but they do UK shares.