Best Portfolio Analysis Tool/website

[Deleted User]

bowlhead99 said:

Deleted_User said:
Just paid for a month, and the analysis is exactly what ii gives me (I have three SIPPs and 4 DCs consolidating into ii) so that's good

The only problem I see is that the calculation of fees in Xray is way different to my own Excel calculation (by almost 100%) - Xray is calculating lower.

The x-ray tools are good for understanding what sort of exposure you have to what sort of assets when aggregated across your portfolio. They help you see if you have a high or low exposure to a particular region or industry sector, type of company, average credit exposure and duration for bonds etc - this can help you understand if you are overexposed to an area or missing an area, which is hard to do with the 'naked eye', so it's valuable. 

The obvious reason why it's useful is that fund holdings can overlap in sector / region / type exposure or individual stock exposure, and when we have multiple funds it would require a great memory and mental gymnastics to visualise how it all fits together. So when adding funds to a portfolio one at a time, even if they appear individually attractive it can be hard to see how they'll 'fit in', without understanding the aggregate of what you already have.

But for fees - there is no 'overlap'. There is no risk that you accidentally forget to have any fees in your portfolio, or that you add a fund without knowing what it costs. When you consider adding a fund, you'll assess whether that particular fund is worth paying a management fee, other ongoing charges and being exposed to transaction costs, to get it.  In doing that, are you planning on thinking to yourself: "hmm, this fund I'm thinking of adding has outrageous fees and running costs which really aren't worth paying to access its total return or volatility potential, it is simply not worth the money - but I have another fund over here which has a really good fee structure so it will all 'average out' when I put it in an aggregation tool - so I can buy this new fund whose fees are an unreasonable drag on performance of that fund, and simply justify it to myself with a bit of stupid man-maths" ?

As such, it doesn't matter so much what the 'x-ray' says your overall portfolio costs. A fund may have high fees or low fees and you can assess whether you're happy to pay the fee, and compare the fee to its direct and indirect rivals in similar sectors. If it is a decent tool for the job, and the fees are acceptable, you will buy it, and if it is a poor tool for the job or its fees are silly, you'll reject it.

An aggregated view of performance is useful, because it helps you understand how your wealth is growing or not growing, net of the fees you were willing to pay, which will have been taken off before showing you the net returns.  Whereas an aggregated 'fee percentage' as a standalone measure is not particularly useful - you'll have already considered each of the fees on the component parts, and getting one fund for cheap wouldn't make it rational to pay an unreasonably high amount for another with "ah well, they seem to average out" as the justification for that fund which was otherwise too expensive to entertain.

So I wouldn't really bother about what x-ray says it costs, because I don't need that information.

I did receive an annual fee analysis on my SIPP from Youinvest last year (which provides research data from morningstar, so perhaps uses them in its fee statements) and some of the fund-level calculations seemed a bit off. But if you are holding various DC workplace pensions and manually adding them to an x-ray tool it may be that their management fee rates are showing up differently in the automated tool from what you are actually paying in any case - because your employer or ex-employer may have a negotiated rate which differs from what goes in the factsheet for that pension holding.

For example a factsheet for a workplace pension version of a third party fund may give a total expense ratio of x%, but is assuming a standard core management fee from the pension provider of y%, while nobody is really paying the full y% because their employers negotiated a better fee of z%. Also worth checking that in your manual fee exercise you have added the correct version of the fund, and that what you added to the x-ray tool is also the correct version of the fund - for example did you add the Aviva or Scottish Widows or L&G version of JP Morgan Emerging Markets Pn that you hold, instead of the OEIC version of the fund, and how would they know what personalised rate you are paying through your employer pension scheme anyway?

I put in my "to be portfolio" into Morning Star which is exactly the same as I built and modelled it in a xls. I am not sure how they have calculated it at all.
As you say - I have a broad idea of the fees anyway - it was just a footnote 

[Deleted User]

Answering my own question - found out the reason that the X Ray had a different OCF to my calculations.
For shares and ETFs, X Ray calculates these as Management Charges and doesn't include them in the OCF total figure.
Whether this is right or wrong - ones for others more knowledgeable to me to comment.

Linton

How can a share have an OCF? Its value is what the market says it is, there isnt someone else taking a cut other than dealing charges which are one-off and whatever your platform charges which is unknown to Morningstar.

bowlhead99

Management charges would be an integral part of an OCF for an open ended fund. 

For an entity that isn't regulated as an open ended fund (such as a share or ETF or insurance company pension) its key costs may be described by an expenses ratio such as TER or a management fee and not use the term 'OCF'.

For an entity which isn't a financial institution at all, such as Apple or Tesco, it will have a very high 'expense ratio' in terms of what feeds into cost-of-sales margin or the ratio of admin, sales and distribution or general costs to its revenues or assets, but this is not really to be compared with the running costs of a pure investment vehicle so they wouldn't try to do that.

But for some entities there can be a grey area - for example an entity that's carrying out real estate investment and development, you might buy it for exposure to the underlying property assets, but what are the 'fund operating costs'? - it may be self managed and have director fees and adviser costs all mixed in with the costs of running a property management joint venture and rent collection business, rather than a simple 'management fee'. And where your holding is an investment company that invests in other funds or investment companies  (sometimes through multiple layers) rather than  they may only capture the look-through cost exposure down to a certain level or for certain types of holdings.  For example a listed private equity investment company running as a fund-of-funds will have exposure to management and performance fees at lower tier investee funds but not try to include all of them in its own expenses ratio, or something like Blackrock/ iShares's Global Property Equity Securities literally holds loads of REITs, some of which have 'management fees', some of which are more internally managed with a whole P&L account to decipher, and the half a percent OCF doesn't include the internal costs of all those holdings which are themselves listed property businesses. 

So, fee reporting is going to be inconsistent between the different things that you might hold in your bucket and want to have analysed by a data aggregation / x-ray tool.  If they have separate buckets for 'management fees' and 'OCFs' which are not double-counting, maybe you could add them together. But if there's double counting the information wouldn't be reliable. If the cost information the aggregation tool gathers only gets reported in the OCF bucket or Management Fee bucket for each holding - and not both - then simply adding them would get you to the number you were looking for. However as some entities may not have meaningful cost disclosure or present it inconsistently, I wouldn't put a huge amount of faith in it.   As I hold a whole range of things in my portfolio (and as mentioned in the earlier post, I'll evaluate the fees of anything I choose to add from time to time and should do my decision-making on whether the fee is acceptable at the level of each individual holding), there is going to be limited usefulness in trying to have an xray tool tell me what the blended average 'fees' would be, so it's not what I would be using the tool to do.