Trust net portfolio tool - am i being thick

Mistermeaner

Hi

Trying to use the trust net portfolio tool to track my investments, some of which are with Zurich (work pension) and some with charles stanley (personal S+S isa)

I've been merrily 'adding' purchases when I've bought bits of bobs of funds, but after making some sales of fund units I wanted to log those as well and cant for the life of me figure out how to do it?

I've been in help on the site and cant find anything and tried all sorts including using minus (-) amounts etc. and none of it works.

Surely this functionaility must be built in?

bowlhead99

It's not a full accounting system it is a free tool to give you a snapshot of what your current portfolio is worth and what that current portfolio was worth a while back.

All it's trying to do is say, ok, you currently have 17 units of Fund A and 2000 units of Fund B and 100 of Share Z, and they cost £1000 and £2500 and £5000 respectively and at today's price they are now worth £1000 and £5000 and £4000 respectively.

And if you click for further detailed analysis, here is an asset allocation of what your current holdings are invested in - underlying holdings, contribution analysis (what growth each of your current holdings would have contributed if held in their current proportions) ; and here is a rough graph of what your current holdings would have looked like going back if you had bought them a few years ago, compared to some indexes or averages etc.

If you sell a quarter of your 2000 units of Fund B, just change your transactions so that you only bought 1500 units of Fund B and only paid £1875 for it. It will update the table to tell you that you hold fewer units and the value of those units is £3750 not £5000. But it is not designed to be tracking the fact that you used to have 2000 and then you sold them down to 1500 on a specific date; it doesn't take negative quantities, as you've seen. Once you reduce the amount you hold, by changing the purchase amounts, the portfolio drill down will take account of you currently holding fewer equities in the different sectors and geographies.

But hey, it's a free tool and you get more from it than you pay for. Most of the free tools are flawed in some way or have some sort of missing functionality that we'd like, so most of us use spreadsheets to help track our own performance and trading history if we need to.

le_loup

bowlhead99 wrote: »

But hey, it's a free tool and you get more from it than you pay for.

Would I criticise a bowlhead treatise?
Not likely, but:

you get more from it than many you pay for.

bowlhead99

le_loup wrote: »

Would I criticise a bowlhead treatise?
Not likely, but:

you get more from it than many you pay for.

That would be factual, as some paid solutions deliver less functionality.

But my point was literally that you get more out of it than you pay for. You pay for nothing, and they give you a half solution. That's more than you paid for. Well, actually, I suppose it depends on whether you class being shown a few ads and promotional articles "paying for it", but I have no problems with seeing them so I consider it a solution I haven't really "paid for".

le_loup

No, no. My point was your missing word "MANY", not the facts of your excellent appraisal.

bowlhead99

No no, I did not mean to miss out the word MANY. My point was not that it was better than many "paid for" solutions. I didn't compare it to ANY solutions that you pay for - it might be worse than all of them.

The point is simply that you "get more out of it than you pay for" because you pay for: nothing, and you get: something out of it.


But as I mentioned in the follow up post, you probably DO get more out of it than from some or many paid-for solutions - so your wording would not be too unreasonable - but I was not trying to go so far as to make that point, as I haven't personally evaluated very many paid-for solutions.

TrustyOven

Would Morningstar's free portfolio tool help?
I think they can track sales, but if you have a large history it would take ages to enter it into their system.

ChesterDog

I think it can.

And I tnink you're right.

I remember looking at it, considering entering all that data, and then deciding that there must be more to life.

:-)

Radiantsoul

I think Morning Star would work, but it would takes ages if you have a lot of transactions. Ages and ages...

JohnRo

Much easier to start using a personal spreadsheet, download the transaction data and process it that way.

Open office does everything excel does for most people's requirements, at no cost and as little or much effort learning how to use the features as you need.

TrustyOven

Google Finance can let you import CSV. So if you can export your transactions from your platform / investments provider, you could import it.

One note about them - not all UK funds / investments are tracked by Google Finance... eg. I don't think my pension fund is listed, but my Fidelity and HSBC funds are. I havnt checked if the ISIN numbers match though.