Tools to manage your portfolio
There’s no need for investors to get bogged down with admin when there are tools that will do the hard work, as well as those that handle trades
Managing your investment portfolio can quickly become overwhelming. Simply executing trades is one thing; it’s a whole other thing keeping track of price movements, company announcements, correlations, weightings and so on.
Thankfully, you don’t have to be a whiz at Excel or have a stockbroker on speed dial. A number of great online tools – for trading as well as admin – can do the heavy lifting.
TRADING
Trading platforms are, as the name suggests, built for executing trades. So while they do provide access to a lot of analytics, the focus is on buying and selling securities.
The big banks have long dominated this space, but that’s changing. Here are some of the leading alternatives.
CMC Markets
This platform took out Money’s Best of the Best 2021 award for best feature-packed non-bank online broker.
It allows you to trade domestic and international shares, exchange traded funds (ETFs), currencies, commodities, cryptocurrencies and bonds.
The product is split into three price tiers, each targeting a different type of investor. “Classic” customers who transact fewer than 11 times a month pay $11 or 0.10% each for the first 10 trades. These users have free access to the standard stockbroking platform and the Stock Screener analysis, as well as free tax and portfolio reporting with the Sharesight feature for up to 10 holdings.
“Active” customers log between 11 and 30 trades a month, paying $9.90 or 0.10% for the first 10 of them.
Finally, “Premium” customers can make more than 30 trades a month, paying $9.90 or 0.075% each.
SelfWealth
SelfWealth has shaken up the brokerage industry by introducing a cheap and simple model where users are charged a $9.50 brokerage fee, irrespective of trade size, and no monthly fees.
“We can compete with the big platform providers and offer low-cost brokerage due to our smaller team and agile operating,” says Jarrod Purchase, SelfWealth’s general manager of marketing.
“We still use the best technology – we plug into IRESS, a world-renowned trading technology platform – but as we don’t have traditional overheads and hundreds of staff, we can keep brokerage low for investors and we still make money.”
The low brokerage fees and no monthly fees allows investors to retain capital in the investment. “Knowing that your fees are low means you can pocket more from the hard work you’ve put in,” says Purchase. “The compounding effect of retaining this money can’t be ignored, either.”
Trade for Good
Trade for Good introduces philanthropy directly into your trading.
“You sign up, choose the charity of your choice and every time you trade we donate 50% of the brokerage fee to the charity on your behalf,” says Trade for Good CEO Alistair Warren. “At the end of the day, our customers choose to trade with us over other platforms because they want to make a difference.”
And as an extra kicker, the donation is tax deductible.
Admittedly, the platform only trades shares and ETFs on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and Chi-X Australia (Chi-X). But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing – currency and CFDs can be hugely risky investments are best left to the professionals.
The brokerage fees are marginally higher than for some of the other platforms, at $18 (ex-GST) or 0.105%, whichever is greater.
MANAGEMENT
These tools, with some exceptions, do not facilitate trades as broking apps do. Rather, they focus on the management and analysis of your portfolio.
InvestSMART
InvestSMART offers a free portfolio management platform through its Portfolio Manager service. Users can log and track stocks across the ASX, 12 international exchanges, ETFs and more than 8000 managed investments. Through its HealthCheck feature, you get 20-minute delayed pricing on all your securities.
A lot of weight – no pun intended – is put on portfolio construction, with the HealthCheck feature comparing your portfolio to a target asset allocation.
Additionally, investors can invest directly in InvestSMART’s own suite of managed equity funds.
Those who sign up to the paid version also get expert research and investment filters and, depending on the payment tier, access to Eureka Report and Intelligent Investor.
Sharesight
Sharesight bills itself as a performance benchmarking and tax reporting platform. Users can aggregate all their data, put it in a common place and then run performance analytics.
One thing that sets Sharesight apart is its ability to calculate capital gains and franking credits in order to generate tax reports. This data can then be migrated to Xero and other platforms.
A strong feature of this platform is the breadth of securities it tracks – basically every listed security in 35 markets around the world, 67 currencies and even unlisted fixed interest and property.
“Capital gains, dividends and currency fluctuations can be tracked over any time period and benchmarked against anything in our database; most people choose to benchmark against an index or ETF,” says Doug Morris, chief executive of Sharesight.
Users can also generate diversity reports that collate your holdings into sectors.
“Our bread and butter is the more serious investor who manages a couple of portfolios and has significant discretionary assets in the market alongside their pension or superannuation. But we still have clients who have basic portfolios with maybe a couple of shares and some cryptocurrency,” says Morris.
Like StockLight, Sharesight has been developed with the long-term investor in mind, rather than the day trader.
“Our ‘ah-ha’ moments with our customers come from the way we handle dividends and things like that, not balloon graphics when you make a trade.”