What is the best free online portfolio service?
I've become unhappy with Yahoo's online portfolio and I want to move to a new service. Which online portfolio service is the best?
Answers
391 points
slick answered 11 months ago …
Google's is pretty nice. It's fairly simple to use and it has a nice interface.
Read more from slick flag as abuse great answer
508 points
John answered 11 months ago …
There are quite a few categorizes of online portfolio services:
Free service: CNBC is amazing. Easy to navigate, many lists, and easily click to find considerable amount of information.
Paid Service: I use Alpha Trade and find quality for a cheaper price. But Thompson and the S&P subscription services are really nice.
Service w/ Account: Think or Swing offers a very nice service if you have an account with them.
John
1130 points
sundarkambam answered 11 months ago …
The best online portfolio service along with their review :
source : Forbes.com
1. MSN Moneycentral
moneycentral.msn.com
MSN Money offers top-notch functionality in most of what it offers, and the deluxe portfolio tracker is no exception. Create portfolios on the site, import them from your brokerage account, or even bring in portfolios you have on Yahoo Finance. Choose several different views that include today's trading and performance over various time periods. MSN's tracker computes true total returns that take dividend payments into account, annualizes returns if you want, and analyzes portfolios according to asset allocation and risk. Unlike most asset allocation features elsewhere, MSN goes beyond broad categories like Domestic Equities and classifies holdings into small-, mid-, or large-cap. Run the Stock Scouter and get numerical scores that rate the quality of the stocks in a portfolio. This tracker is head and shoulders above the rest and it's free. The deluxe tracker requires downloading a plug-in that runs with Internet Explorer--only on Windows PCs, of course.
BEST: Multiple views, easy importing, and excellent analytical tools.
WORST: As with all of MSN's best stuff, Mac users are out of luck.
2. GainsKeeper
www.gainskeeper.com
A part of tax advice powerhouse CCH, this site focuses on portfolio tracking. Keep track of stocks, mutual funds, bonds and options. You can import portfolios straight from your broker or from Excel or Quicken files, and GainsKeeper will assign a Sell Grade to each holding that tells you which stocks are the most "tax advantageous sells." Site automatically updates your portfolio for stock dividends, mergers, return of capital and stock splits. The DivTracker calculates which dividend income can be classfied as Qualified Dividends (which are taxed at a lower rate). GainsKeeper creates a Schedule D, which can be exported directly to tax preparation software. Run "what if" scenarios to find out the implications of your buys and sells before you make a trade. The site has good educational sections that will explain issues such as calculating cost basis and how to trade tax-efficiently. But you may worry it's not worth paying up to $149 a year to track 1,000 stocks ($49 for 100).
BEST: Clever bells and whistles help explain tax ramifications.
WORST: You can a lot of this stuff free elsewhere.
3. Morningstar.com
www.morningstar.com
Morningstar's standard portfolio tracker, with intraday and overall performance evaluations as well as news and research, is free. And it's not very different from other free trackers out there. But for $13 a month, you get more advanced analytics, including reports from Morningstar analysts and grades of your holdings on factors like financial health and profitability. Premium service includes X-ray overview, which breaks down your portfolio by asset, sector and stock type, and makes allocation recommendations.
BEST: Access to Morningstar research and cool graphics to show risk and asset allocation of your portfolio.
WORST: The features that differentiate the site require you to pay. Also, no service for Mac users.
4. Reuters Investor
www.reuters.com/investing
Formerly known as Multex and before that Market Guide, Reuters Investor offers a competent free portfolio and watch-list tracker where you can easily put in your tickers, shares bought, prices and commissions and view your stocks in any of four different views: performance, valuation, fundamentals and today's action. Reuters also allows you to track your holdings in any of 16 different currencies from Malaysian Ringgits to the Canadian dollar. The performance view is color coded with bright green representing profits and red, losses. You also get click throughs for each of your stock holdings to premium research as well as ample stock information, news and charts.
BEST: Links to Reuters ample research and stock information.
WORST: Difficult to customize column heads in your portfolio.
5. StockSelector.com
www.stockselector.com
Sometimes it pays to offer something different. StockSelector.com's tracker is like most others, but it's a little easier to input your information and the site lets you input your tax bracket to see how capital gains taxes will impact your investments. You can view your portfolio 15 different ways, including analyst summary, technical summary, investor sentiment and financial ratios. There are also links to the names of the analysts who cover your stocks.
BEST: Capital gains tax calculations.
WORST: Can't download portfolios.
6. B4Utrade
www.b4utrade.com
For $25 per month or $250 per year, you get a Streaming Portfolio Tracker, featuring real-time quotes and news, institutional interest, interactive charting and Level II market maker activity. The site also has valuable research tools, such as stock screens based on what brokerages, fund managers and celebrity traders are doing. The graphics are certainly there, but the site lacks some of the analysis tools other portfolio trackers offer.
BEST: Streaming real-time quotes and interactive charts.
WORST: No download capabilities or portfolio analysis tools.
7. BusinessWeek Online
www.businessweek.com
For free you can create up to 25 different portfolios of stocks and mutual funds. Besides the basics, each holding links to articles from sources including BusinessWeek and Reuters. Pay up, and you get access to Decipher My Portfolio, which examines the performance of your holdings relative to certain market benchmarks.
BEST: S&P stock ratings for paying customers.
WORST: Sluggish response.
8. CBS MarketWatch
cbs.marketwatch.com
You'll find helpful links to company financials, estimates, insider trades, price-movement charts and graphics showing your portfolio's concentration by industry or asset class. You also can download portfolios onto Excel or your PDA, including your customized views and data. Unfortunately, you can't import portfolios from your online broker. E-mail alerts inform you of news about your stocks.
BEST: Great graphs with multiple preset time frames.
WORST: Lots of ads and graphics tend to slow down your experience.
9. FT.com
www.ft.com
Salvation for investors whose stock-picking world extends beyond the NYSE and NASDAQ. Drawing on it's strength as an international financial news source, FT.com allows you to track both foreign and domestic stocks, as well as offshore funds. Provides standard portfolio allocation analyzer, financial data and news, and you can track your portfolio in 24 different currencies (a conversion calculator is included). Tracker suffers from standard flaws, like inability to calculate total returns.
BEST: Portfolio tracking for global stock in different currencies.
WORST: A painfully slow site.
10. FinPortfolio.com
www.finportfolio.com
FinPortfolio.com combines a standard portfolio tracker with financial planning tools, including its five-step Risk Analyis and Style Analysis process that helps determine whether and how well your investments are meeting your financial goals. You can import portfolios from other sites or from your desktop and put them through the Analyzers to see how they are faring.
BEST: Good financial planning and risk management analysis.
WORST: Not a lot of tracking tools.
11. Globeinvestor.com
www.globeinvestor.com
Canada's Bell Globemedia presents Globeinvestor.com, which offers a tracker that lets you monitor stocks, bonds, funds and even real estate. To help get a full picture of your holdings, there are earnings estimates, analyst recommendations and mutual fund trading activity (to see who's trading your stocks). You can get intraday, annualized and rolling reports on your portfolio, and there is a breadth of information on Canadian stocks and markets.
BEST: Good market commentary from a Canadian perspective.
WORST: Can't upload or download portfolios from elsewhere.
12. PortfolioScience
www.portfolioscience.com
With PortfolioScience, you can customize up to five portfolios and calculate how much is at risk for each holding and for the whole portfolio. This can be calculated for varying time periods, from daily to annually. The site also offers a Risk Screener, which finds investments meeting certain risk criteria, a Stress Test, which measures how your portfolio will respond to potential market moves, and a Portfolio Simulation, which lets you see how certain changes to your portfolio may change its level of risk. You can get a free one-week trial offer or subscribe for $20.
BEST: Good risk analysis tools.
WORST: Not a great deal of news or research.
13. Quicken.com
www.quicken.com
Quicken is renowned for its tax and financial software, so you'd expect it to have a pretty sharp tool for tracking stocks, and it does. The sites clean, simple design makes it easy to input your portfolio and customize your view to include short-term gains, long-term gains (albeit only capital gains--dividends you'll have to work out on your own) and tax implications. If you're weighing a trade, there are links to Quicken's rich bank of data, including growth trends, debt-to-equity ratios, P/Es and P/E growth rates of your stocks relative to its industry. An intrinsic value tool will even tell you if your stocks are overvalued, undervalued, or valued fairly based on earnings growth. Everything is download-able, of course, to Quicken's popular software.
BEST: Great for figuring tax implications of sales.
WORST: You can only use it if you've purchased a Quicken product.
14. RiskGrades
www.riskgrades.com
To meet your investment goals, it's important to evaluate and manage risk. RiskGrades helps you do that by assigning a numerical risk score to each asset. The site takes into account risk factors for equities, interest rates, currencies and commodities when calculating each score. You can set up personalized portfolios and measure your risk tolerance, run "what if" scenarios, and receive Risk Alerts to notify you of changes in the risk profile of any of your holdings. You can also set up hypothetical portfolios to measure the added risk of assets you may wish to buy. The Risk Map shows the risk and market cap of an individual stock and the market (S&P 500 or Nasdaq 100) as a whole.
BEST: Good education tools to teach you how to manage risk.
WORST: Takes a while to get started.
15. SmartMoney.com
www.smartmoney.com/portfolio
Overall a bit disappointing, considering the excellent editorial content that comes from SmartMoney. You can't tell the SmartMoney tracker when you acquired or sold stocks, so you can't compute annualized returns or compare performance against major market indexes. You have to input dividends manually. If you accumulated your position slowly, buying it at different prices, you'll have to compute your blended basis price on your own. Maybe if you're a fan of bells and whistles, no matter how useless, for $6 a month, SmartMoney's heatmap tracker, which uses color and sound to indicate how your holdings did today, will entertain you.
BEST: The colorful heatmaps.
WORST: Ability to track performance is poor at best.
