Online financial portfolio

The financial meltdown last September had caused erosion of my capital by over 50%. Though my financial portfolio is not big, it is the only source by which I am able to meet my expenses. My major investments are in MF and less in Stocks. The distribution in equity and debt in MF was 75-25. A heavy loss occurred to me. Though my heart sank by this event, it did not stall fortunately. I decided to monitor my investments on a daily basis. It meant, I had to create a portfolio tracker online.

I searched and found different portals which gave free services to maintain a portfolio online. After a lot of research, I found that www.moneycontrol.com was the best for an Indian Investor like me. In this site, we can add all types of financial instruments. It also provides space for adding liabilities to evaluate net worth. NAV’s of stocks are updated in real time when trading is on and that of MFs once a day. This also provides links to a particular  stock or MF to know about the company (or fund), its performance data, dividend history, promoter details, comparison chart and so on. These links provide enough data that an investor can wish for, excepting online trading. This portal is not meant to do that.

I tried various portals like HDFC Securities, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance. HDFC securities portal allows online trading, but we can create a portfolio on traded securities only. We can not add other instruments like MF. Google Finance allows creating portfolios with Indian stocks, but not Indian MFs. Yahoo Finance allows both Indian stocks and Indian MFs, but not other instruments. So, the final vote by me was to www.moneycontrol.com. There are other sites like NDTV profit that provide this service, but I was not impressed.

I wrote a blog on Gnucash in January 2009. I indicated there that I was struggling to activate two functions of Gnucash. I could solve the second issue mentioned in that blog. It is updating prices of stocks and MFs. This was possible by adding the plug-in Finance::Quotes to GnuCash. After adding the plug-in, I selected proper price sources and symbols. The price source selected was yahoo finance for stocks and AMFI (Association of Mutual Funds of India) for MFs. It works well now and I am able to update stock and MF prices in GnuCash at the press of button.

I am able to see worth of my stocks and MFs in real time. I am more informed now. I am able to make changes to my portfolio to contain damages and increase my return in time. Why not you try www.moneycontrol.com, if you have a portfolio?