Morningstar Premium or alternatives?

djantler

I'm looking for a good way of tracking my investments (mainly unit trusts). I've started using the free Morningstar portfolio service which seems to work pretty well to give me basic performance tracking features so far, but would like something with deeper analysis.

I'm considering the Morningstar Premium service - has anyone else used this much or are there any suggestions for good alternatives?

Linton

Trustnet has a free portfolio facility which provides an overall analysis by country and sector, and a range of performance info.

bowlhead99

The Morningstar service, or at least elements of it, is bundled with some broker/platform accounts giving some premium features. For example on my accounts at TD Direct I can click a button to run an 'x-ray' of my portfolio to see geographic and sectoral exposure, top 10 underlying holdings etc. And export my portfolio to excel and so on.

Similarly with Youinvest, the 'research' section is powered by Morningstar but I've never bothered to do an Xray of my own portfolio there as you have to set it up first, it's a different part of the website than your actual live portfolio, and I couldn't be bothered. I can track returns at a rudimentary level with the basic morningstar or trustnet services but they are both flawed in terms of what historic data they can really capture so I use my own excel for performance analysis.

I'm not sure how useful some of the other features of Premium would be (e.g. if you're mostly using UTs and don't need live pricing etc). You've probably found the summary of its features, e.g. google gives me this page: http://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/premium/overview?referid=U0020

Probably the most useful thing on that page is that it mentions you can get a 14 day trial, so you can cancel after a couple of weekends of playing with it and avoid blowing £159 a year on something you never make use of.

Another portfolio monitoring / investment tracking system is Sharescope, again they have free trials. Probably more useful when investing in individual stocks where you want complex graphs and charts and pricing but there might be something in it of interest for you. I never got round to taking a trial but will do at some point as others on here have recommended it.

Bottom line though is even if it seems useful, how much value do you really get out of it in terms of helping your decisions? Let's say you find a premium service which looks pretty interesting for £200 - £400 a year. If your investments were only making 4-5% a year after tax, you are effectively giving up all your returns on £4-£10k of your portfolio to fund the information service. If you have a £300k portfolio and you find it a useful addition to your investing armoury, that might be fine. For a £5k portfolio, it would be ridiculous.

djantler

Thanks, think I will try out the 14 day trial of Morningstar Premium and see how useful I find it! I have a six figure portfolio but even so as you say it would need to give enough value to be worthwhile.

The other option would be to try to do more of my own analysis in excel. Is there a source of easily available historic price data (and ideally sector and holding breakdowns) for unit trusts to use for excel importing?

puppey

djantler wrote: »

Thanks, think I will try out the 14 day trial of Morningstar Premium and see how useful I find it! I have a six figure portfolio but even so as you say it would need to give enough value to be worthwhile.

The other option would be to try to do more of my own analysis in excel. Is there a source of easily available historic price data (and ideally sector and holding breakdowns) for unit trusts to use for excel importing?

I thought morningstar had the option for importing the data to excel when I last used it. Double check! But definitely agree to try out the 14 day Morningstar premium