Portfolio Trackers: Comparing Google Finance, MSN Money, and Yahoo Finance

A portfolio tracker is a tool that enables investors to monitor the performance of their investments at a single glance. When you open an account with a broker, the account is setup with the broker’s portfolio tracker that records your transactions and reports your gains and losses. But what if investors want to keep frequent tabs on their investments without worrying about malicious Malware stealing their login or password information? The solution is to setup a mirror-image of your broker’s portfolio on a financial services website. In looking for a good portfolio tracker, investors need to consider how closely the tracker mimics the day-to-day activities of their brokerage account and how easy the portfolio tracker is to setup and maintain. This article compares the portfolio trackers offered by three popular financial services (Google Finance, MSN Money, and Yahoo Finance), which are free to anyone who becomes a registered user of their website.

You can maintain as many portfolios in Google Finance as you like, and each can hold up to 200 transactions. Entering transactions is a breeze with Google Finance’s interface. You have the choice of importing existing portfolios from OFX or CSV files or keying in the transaction information manually. You can even create a “what if” portfolio from your current watch list of stocks with a single click. The portfolio accommodates the most common types of investments, including stocks traded on the major United States exchanges and over the counter (OTC), stocks from an impressive list of foreign exchanges, ETFs, and mutual funds, but the portfolio does not currently support CDs, options, or bonds. One of the best features of the Google portfolio is the ease in which it handles stock splits and dividends in the cash account. The interface for entering transactions is modern and interactive with a drop-down list for type of activity (buy, sell, buy to cover, or sell short) and a pop-out calendar for selecting the transaction date. The default activity is set to treat a transaction as a noncash event, but the user can make a transaction a cash event by simply checking a box. Google Finance has four preset screens (Overview, Fundamental, Performance, and Transaction) that provide the basic financial data and evaluation tools in a table format, but the content on the view table is not capable of being customized.

In November 2009, MSN Money is retiring the deluxe portfolio manager and replacing it with what is known as the portfolio manager preview (currently available). The new portfolio is optimized for larger portfolios, but you will need to download Microsoft Siverlight on your computer. Transactions are entered manually in a format similar to Google Finance, but the ability to define the activity is much broader with options to record the activity as (buy, sell, dividends, other income, other expense, return of capital, reinvest dividend, add share, remove shares, and stock splits). The portfolio can track the most common types of investments, including domestic, foreign, and OTC stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, but the portfolio does not currently support CDs, options or bonds. MSN Money’s view tables are the most interactive with a cursor triggered pop out window to explain each financial criterion displayed in the view table. The system offers six preset views (Standard, Valuation, Quotes, Fundamental, Holdings, and Analysis). A customized view can be created with over 60 financial data and evaluation tools, including its own proprietary StockScouter rating system.