If you want to make it big in the world of business, you’ve got to have a few things: an elevator pitch that knocks it out of the park, a killer resume and cover letter, and a portfolio.
And for your portfolio, you’ve got to be able to show off your work on the go—and not just your written work. That’s why we’ve rounded up some of the best apps for portfolio management out there.
Table of Contents
Best Apps For Portfolio Management
Keeping track of your investment accounts is no small task. Between your employer’s 401(k) plan, one or more individual retirement accounts (IRAs), a health savings account (HSA) and taxable investment accounts, you could end up managing more than a few investment portfolios. My wife and I have more than a dozen.
Juggling multiple accounts is a big job that comes with big challenges, like building an asset allocation plan, tracking performance and logging into multiple accounts. Keeping an eye on expenses across accounts can involve serious mental gymnastics.
One effective solution is to use software or an app to manage the process. Let’s take a look at five investment tracking apps available today that I consider to be the best.
Personal Capital’s Free Financial Dashboard
Personal Capital offers a free financial dashboard that I’ve used for many years. In my opinion, Personal Capital is the best overall investment tracking solution available today.
Begin by opening a free account, and then link your various financial accounts to the Personal Capital platform. For me, this includes not only my 401(k) and individual retirement account, but also taxable investment accounts, bank accounts and credit card accounts.
Once your accounts are linked, Personal Capital’s dashboard aggregates all of your financial data and provides a wealth of information and analysis. Focusing on its investment tools, Personal Capital provides the following high-level information:
It classifies your investments between retirement and taxable accounts.
It displays your investments by account or by individual holding.
It tracks your investment performance over time, comparing your returns to several benchmarks.
Personal Capital also organizes your investments by asset class. It does so using the following investment categories:
Cash
International bonds
US bonds
International stocks
US stocks
Alternatives
In addition to aggregating and sorting your account and investment data, Personal Capital provides tools that provide insight into your retirement investments, the fees you’re paying and an investment checkup that looks at your overall asset allocation.
Financial Planning & Wealth Management with Personal Capital
Get a holistic view of customers’ entire financial picture with Personal Capital, from day-to-day spending to tracking portfolio performance.
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How Does Personal Capital’s Retirement Planner Work?
Personal Capital offers a robust retirement planner that incorporates all of the holdings in linked accounts, along with spending data from the linked bank and credit card accounts. The retirement planner enables you to add specific income events, such as Social Security and planned pre-retirement savings. You can also add spending goals, such as a trip around the world that you plan to take after you retire.
The retirement planner enables you to set your effective tax rate, an assumed inflation rate and your life expectancy. You can also create multiple retirement scenarios that can then be compared. For example, you could create two different scenarios with different spending levels.
With these data points, the retirement planner calculates the chance your portfolio will support your retirement goals. The tool also provides a detailed cash flow table through your assumed life expectancy.
How Does Personal Capital’s Fee Analyzer Work?
Personal Capital’s retirement fee analyzer calculates your overall expense ratio across all of your investments. In my case, fees totaled 6 basis points. The tool then shows you the amount of fees you’ll pay over time and the effect they will have on your portfolio returns. The tool is designed to calculate your fees up until your date of retirement. This date can be changed so that you can see the impact of fees over a longer period of time.
How Does Personal Capital’s Investment Checkup Work?
Finally, Personal Capital offers what it calls an investment checkup. This tool analyzes your current asset allocation and compares it to a recommended asset allocation. For both allocations, Personal Capital shows you historical performance, future projections and risk and return expectations.
Morningstar’s Portfolio Manager
The Morningstar Portfolio Manager takes a different approach than Personal Capital’s financial dashboard. With Morningstar, you must manually enter each of your investments into its Portfolio Manager tool (although the company says it’s working on an automated solution).
While it takes more work to enter your investment account data into Morningstar’s Portfolio Manager, the analysis provided by the tool is well worth the effort. The tool provides basic data about each of your investments, including its current price, daily changes in value and its percentage weight in your overall portfolio.
Morningstar’s Portfolio Manager also provides robust data on overall portfolio performance. It shows you your portfolio’s total return by month and year, and compares it to a benchmark of your choice. Where Morningstar really shines, however, is with its Instant X-Ray feature.
Instant X-Ray gives you detailed information about your portfolio’s asset allocation. It shows you the investment style box of your portfolio for both stocks and bonds. It breaks out your investments by sector, stock type and even by region. And it shows you the weighted average mutual fund expense ratio of your portfolio.
Finally, Instant X-Ray shows you what percentage each individual investment in your portfolio represents in your portfolio as a whole. This can be particularly useful for those who invest in mutual funds. In my case, Apple represents just over 13% of my portfolio. That’s due in part to direct ownership of Apple stock, but also to the heavy weight given to large companies like Apple in index funds that are also part of my portfolio.
Morningstar offers both a free and paid membership. You can use its Portfolio Monitor with either membership, although some tools require a paid membership.
eMoneyAdvisor’s Retirement Cash Flow Analysis
eMoney Advisor is available from financial advisors. While I manage my own investments, I do use an advisor to discuss questions from time to time. As a result, I have access to this tool. Similar to Personal Capital, eMoney Advisor aggregates all of your financial data by linking your accounts.
While the interface is not as polished as Personal Capital, eMoney Advisor does provide a wealth of information, and its portfolio analysis is quite sophisticated. Specifically, it can project future cash flows of a portfolio through retirement, and it’s this feature that I’ve found to be the most valuable.
Specifically, eMoney Advisor will project cash flows throughout your retirement based on a number of data points and assumptions. It takes into account future Social Security payments as well as the required minimum distribution (RMDs) of tax-deferred retirement accounts. It enables you to set an amount for annual spending in retirement, and then adjusts it for inflation.
The resulting cash flow report is broken down by year. For each year, it shows you your total income, investment income and planned retirement distributions. It also shows total expenses, which can include not only annual expenses adjusted for inflation, but also one-time expenses you plan to incur during retirement. Finally, it shows the total portfolio over time.
Beyond this cash flow report, eMoney Advisor provides the type of portfolio data and analysis you would expect. It breaks out a portfolio’s asset allocation and offers data on estate planning and tax issues.
Portfolio Analysis with Quicken Premier
Quicken Premier offers investment tools to track and analyze a portfolio. It’s well-suited for those who prefer software over an online app, and the Premiere version of Quicken allows you to connect your investment accounts to the software. Once an account is connected, Quicken tracks investment activity, including all transactions in the accounts. What’s particularly noteworthy is Quicken’s use of Morningstar data.
For example, Quicken will show you the Morningstar category of each investment, its rank in that category, the Morningstar rating and other Morningstar data. Quicken also gives you access to Morningstar’s Instant X-Ray tool described above. In this, you get access to the data offered by Morningstar without having to manually enter your portfolio.
Quicken also enables you to set a target asset allocation and then compares it with your portfolio’s actual asset allocation. You can review the asset allocation at the portfolio level, the account level or by individual security.
The one downside to Quicken is its user interface. The software looks like it hasn’t been updated in a long time. It’s functional, but not polished.
Build Your Own Spreadsheet in Google Sheets
If you would prefer not to link investment accounts to an online tool or software app, Google Sheets offers an excellent way to track your investments. While a Google Sheets spreadsheet requires you to manual enter your portfolio data, Google Finance functions can automatically update the market price of each security.
The spreadsheet that I use is particularly well-suited when it comes to rebalancing a portfolio. As helpful as the tools listed above are, I find myself going back to this spreadsheet each time I need to make an adjustment to my asset allocation. The sheet allows me to see the target allocation for each asset class, along with variance from target based on the market performance of my portfolio. In this short video (created for my own personal finance site), you’ll find a helpful tutorial on how to use the spreadsheet.
investment tracking spreadsheet
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There are a lot of tools out there to track your investments. One of my favorites is Personal Capital. It offers a free online financial dashboard that automatically tracks your investments and your spending. Today I have another option for you–a free spreadsheet that tracks your investments and tells you when it’s time to rebalance your portfolio.
I have to give a BIG thank you to a reader named Dan. He built this spreadsheet and shared it with me weeks ago. With his permission, I’ve created a copy and am sharing it with you today. Thanks, Dan!
The Spreadsheet
To start, you can see the spreadsheet by clicking here. It is built in Google Sheets. When you go to the spreadsheet, you’ll see a sample portfolio built with Vanguard mutual funds and ETFs. This is not my portfolio (or Dan’s). But it will give you a clear picture of how it works.
You’ll want to make a copy of it so that you can edit it and save your own portfolio. Remember, in order to make a copy, you’ll need a Google account and you’ll need to be signed in. Once that’s taken care of, you can make a copy by selecting ‘File’ from the menu and then ‘Make A Copy.’
The workbook has just two sheets. The first sheet lists all of your holdings (click image to enlarge):
The sections in color you’ll need to fill out. Once you do, the other columns get automatically populated using the Google Finance function and built-in formulas. Note that for ETFs you’ll need to input the expense ratio yourself. For reasons unknown, the Google Finance function doesn’t provide it.
The second page provides a summary of your investments by asset class, tells you when it’s time to rebalance, and provides a graph of your investments:
The Rick Ferri and Personal Capital allocations are there just for ideas. You’ll enter your asset allocation in the column labeled “My Target.” Note that the spreadsheet comes with five asset classes listed in rows three through seven. The spreadsheet calculates how much you have in each asset class based on column D of the first page of the workbook. If you want to add or change asset classes, you can. Just remember to add them in column D of page one and then add a row for each new class on this page.
I use both this spreadsheet AND Personal Capital to track my investments. The spreadsheet helps me rebalance my investments, as you’ll see below. Personal Capital is excellent for tracking investment fees, asset allocation, and even my monthly budget. It’s by far my favorite financial tool, and it’s totally free.
Rebalancing
One of the cool features of this spreadsheet is the rebalancing function. You’ll see in the sheet above columns labeled ‘Actual’, ‘Diff’, and ‘Threshold.’ It’s critical to understand how these work.
Actual: This simply calculates the actual amount of investments you have in each asset class. This data comes from the Holdings page of the spreadsheet.
Diff: This column calculates the difference between your target allocation by class and your actual allocation. Note that some of the cells in this column are in red.
Threshold: This column allows you to set a threshold for each asset class. In other words, how much can your actual investments drift from your target allocation before you need to rebalance? Once your actual allocation drifts from your target by the threshold percentage, the difference in the Diff column turns red. It’s a visual way to see what part of your portfolio might need to be rebalanced.
Leave comments below if you have any questions on how to use the spreadsheet.
Enjoy! Check It Out: Personal Capital Review
Conclusion
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