Bt Investments Blog

It is important to calculate and track portfolio performance accurately. Most often the performance is assumed based on few stocks or transactions and not based on the portfolio as a whole. The portfolio tools available on different sites like Yahoo finance or brokers provide a snapshot of your portfolio at any given time and does not provide ability to track the history. It also does not take into consideration how much money you added or withdrawn during a period and its effect on the numbers.

The information Portfolio Tracker provides (which I am discussing here) is crucial in understanding if the time we spend picking our own stocks and the risk we are incurring doing so is worth or not. You can easily look at how a low cost index fund would have performed during the same period versus your own fund. It also provides information on how your portfolio performed at any given point in past. Once you have the data in this format, you can use to present it in any formats e.g. Charts.

I have been using this simple method to track my portfolio performance since last 2 years.

Highlights:
- The portfolio is tracked similar to Mutual Funds, which are based on units.
- You can keep using the existing portfolio tools (from your broker or free). No need to track individual stock transactions like purchase or sale of stocks in the tracker.
- You can decide on the frequency of updating the tracker. I update it every weekend, once every month also works. It takes only around 5 mins of your time everytime you update it.
- All you need is an Excel like spread sheet. I use Google Docs, as it allows me to access the data from anywhere. It has almost all the features including charts and works like Excel. Charts are similar to what you see in Google Finance.
- Flexible and customizable according to your own needs. We could even added other investments like fixed deposit or bonds while calculating the total portfolio value. These values may not change every week, but adding it helps calculate accurate value of your portfolio.
- Provides data on how the fund performed during any of the previous weeks or months. With current fund price, users can look for the index values and portfolio totals which corresponds to same unit price in the past.
- Ability to add multiple investors and track their investments in the portfolio. Run your own fund!
- Dividends received will get added to cash holdings and thus be part of the portfolio calculations.

Screenshot:



** Each row represent one week data and items marked in green are the only items needs to be entered manually.

Entry Types:
- Status: Weekly status of portfolio
- Purchase: New Money Addition
- Withdraw: Withdrawal of money.
*again, there are not individual transactions of shares.

Sample portfolio tracking sheet:
View as web page: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rdBrHqAaLFO17KYydJj79iA&single=true&gid=12&output=html

View and copy as Google spreadsheet: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rTWMVyD677ubsd1VG8bli9Q

Download as excel sheet: Sample Portfolio Performance Tracker

Send me an email or add a comment with email id if you have trouble accessing or getting a copy of the spreadsheet or if you have any questions regarding the post.

Steps:
1. Add total portfolio and cash position and divide it by an arbitrary number (initial unit price) like 10 or 100. This gives the number of units. At this point we have the total portfolio value, unit price and number of units or shares. What are the critical values in the spreadsheet. Later when you add or withdraw money, you are adding units or reducing the number of units and the unit price will remain same.
2. Choose an interval to update the document. e.g weekly once.
3. Update the portfolio value and cash positions along with indexes values.
4. If there is addition of new money or withdrawal of money, update the document by marking it.
5. Use this information while making investment decisions.

This is a simple but very effective way to see how your investments are doing compared to benchmark like stock market indexes. The graphs on this site is generated based on this calculations.

You would think that the Microsoft would hold the news of Windows 8 in abeyance until the release of the first Service Pack. After all, business users haven’t made the switch to Windows 7 just yet, waiting for the first service package to iron out any early wrinkles. One of those early wrinkles could be the small fix to increase stability that decreased the stability of many systems.

Today, the Microsoft sales machine decided to get the user base whipped up with fanciful things about the upcoming Windows 8, something most people hardly are worried about. The job of the Microsoft machine is to get people worried about it; well, at least anxious. In this case though the first run of the machine gives hype, the FUD comes later.

[InfoWorld]

Windows 8, the theoretical next version of Microsoft’s ubiquitous OS, will  be different from what has been expected of the platform, according to a cached version of a Microsoft blog post.

The Google-cached version of a January 31 blog on MSDN, entitled, “What’s in store for the next Windows?” provided a limited glimpse of what to expect. The OS also was referred to as Windows.next.

“The minimum that folks can take for granted is that the next version will be something completely different from what folks usually expect of Windows — I am simply impressed with the process that Steven [Sinofsky,  president of the Microsoft Windows and Windows Live Division] has set up to listen to our customers needs and wants and get a team together than can make it happen,” the post, from a member of the Windows update team, said.

“To actually bring together dozens and dozens of teams across Microsoft to come up with a vision for Windows.next is a process that is surreal! The themes that have been floated truly reflect what people have been looking for years and it will change the way people think about PCs and the way they use them. It is the future of PCs,” the blogger said.

My, but they do go on.  The language at this point is always flowery and nebulous, for pinning them down would be difficult. If anyone remembers all that Windows Vista was to have, and then dropped, bit by bit, it is clear that not much stock can be put in early reports from Microsoft.

I’d be happy with having the feature set of Windows 7 with all the features pruned away when they made Vista – in other words Windows 7 with the deleted features of XP added in. Yes, that would be completely different – something that works and doesn’t remove good things for no reason.

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Technorati Tags: Windows 8,replacing FUD with HYPE,no features named,nebulous benefits,typical Microsoft procedures,Windows 7 plus features dropped added in,“new” http://bellcovisa.co.tv/

Stock screens allow investors to sort through lots of different stocks in search for only the ones that fit certain criteria.  Investors looking for the next stock pick for their portfolios can use basic screening tools, available at both Yahoo! Finance and Google Finance. MSN recently retired its highly-regarded stock screening tools, leaving what’s freely available somewhat lacking.

Screening 2.0, something I like to discuss on the site, provides the same outcomes but incorporates more algorithmic know-how, some artificial intelligence (how do you deal with an infinite P/E one year?), better ability to backtest results, and preset criteria to match results of the world’s best investors.

I decided to piece together a list of some of the Internet’s best free and premium stock screening resources.

So, here goes:

General Investing

• Validea: One of my favorites and started by author of The Guru Investor, John Reese.  Validea is a premium service that tracks screens preconfigured with the investing criteria of history’s greatest investors, like Buffett, Graham, Peter Lynch, Ken Fisher, and more.
• Finviz: Lots of stuff going on here. IMO, the most powerful, free screener available.  With fewer preset screens, Finviz is for more advanced investors who have specific criteria they look for in stocks.  A whole lotta descriptive, fundamental, and technical ways to sort for new ideas.
• Manual of Ideas: Mentioned in my post from last week, Top 6 Ideas for Piggyback Investing, MOI has both free and premium screens like 10×45 Bargain Hunter, European Value Report, Equities and Tobin’s Q.  These screens come in form of subscription newsletters (again, some free, some premium) with more analysis included beyond the output of the stock screens.
• AAII Screens: Blown away by how many screens the American Association of Individual Investors has on its website (you have to join AAII to access these screens).  You can find growth and value screens with preset parameters (like IBD Stable 70 and CAN SLIM) as well as guru screens that look for specific investment criteria established by famed investors like Graham, Buffett, Dreman, Lynch, Zweig, etc.
• Zacks: Nice combination of some free screens (Earnings & Margins, Growth and Income) and premium screens (Zacks Rank 1)
• CNBC: lets users save custom made screens and also has a few prepackaged screens for free
• The Kirk Report: Couldn’t be remiss in mentioning the great screens Kirk puts together for subscribers to his service.  He calls his screens, the Stock Screen Machine.
• The Motley Fool’s CAPS: Nifty free screener that incorporates the community’s CAPS ratings into the screens. Allows users to download results to spreadsheets.

Value Investing

• Old School Value: Nice site with numerous free screeners for all kinds of value investing
• MagicFormulaInvesting: Built by the man, himself — Joel Greenblatt, this is a nice free site to do basic screening for stocks that fit the criteria of the Magic Formula

Institutional Ownership

• AlphaClone: Of course, this hedge fund slicer-and-dicer is a stock screen of sorts.  This premium product (read my review here) allows users to identify the top performing funds, peer into their holdings and backtest their strategies.

Insider Buying/ Selling

• GuruFocus: Interesting free and premium offerings that track top guru buys as well as insider transactions.  Can download results into spreadsheets for more analysis.

Technicals

• StockFetcher: Nice premium screen for technical investors encompassing Bollingers, Candlesticks, Moving Averages, and more. Output is downloadable to Excel.

I am SURE I left really good tools out — let me know in the comments if you think I should include something I’ve missed.

Tagged as: dreman, investing, peter lynch, screening 2.0, stock screen, warren buffett