Anyone know of a good stock price monitoring tool?
 

Hi, I am gradually getting more interested in our investments, now that we are getting close to the retirement thing.

What I'd like to have is a service where I can download the daily closing (or intra-day) price of all the stocks in my portfolio so that I can manage performance. Ideally it would be automatic or at least some process I can kick off and download into my machine and keep history and trend information.

Nothing too complex, the alternative is that I just key the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, but that is a bit tedious.

Oh yeah, it'd need to have multiple exchange data including NYSE, TSE, DAX, etc....

Anyone have a good way to do this?

Thanks

Dennis

I've been using a toilet to monitor my positions the past few days :)

I use my.yahoo.com

You can go about this two different ways:

Free:

The best free portfolio application I have seen is the Portfolio Manager at MSN Money. It has been able to handle everything I have ever thrown at it. Downside is that most changes in your number of portfolio shares must be manually input (since it has no way to know when you sell/buy/reinvest). If your portfolio is rather straightforward with just a couple of mutual funds manual input is no big deal. If you have a large complex portfolio, life is too short for that kind of tedium.

Spend a little, get a lot:

As they say in the Porsche world, "While you are in there anyway" ....

Buy Quicken Premier. You can link all your different accounts (Savings/checking/brokerage/401k/IRA) and get direct updates from each. I suspect most people use it just to do their routine banking. Use it to its full potential and its an excellent way to keep tabs on all your assets. Added bonus, come tax time .... one button transfer of all brokerage transactions into the IRS forms.

I use www.marketwatch.com , it allows you to send alerts and I believe you can enter all stock symbols from various exchanges and get end of day spreadsheet to download to excel. The other option is to have all your holdings consolidated into an account with one brokerage like fidelity and monitor at the end of the day. While I look at my portfolio daily, I only monitor historical information on a monthly basis.

Some of my holdings are with Fidelity. Although not "downloadable" (that I'm aware of), Fidelity does have a nice feature call "full view" which retrieves info from other brokerages, etc. and consolidates everything under one view. By design, I have chosen NOT to consolidate all my holdings into one account. I envision using 72t distributions at some point in time, and having one's portfolio spread among several brokerages allows one to have MUCH more flexibility in that regard.

Most online brokers have great tools. I use www.optionsxpress.com.

Another vote for OX. Their real-time streaming ticker is very good.

Dennis, Um... I hate to sound critical but that is about the worst thing you can do. Go to the local library and read ValueLine to monitor your individual stocks. They do a new report every three months, and that is way too quick to be honest.

Yeah, watch what Cramer says and then do exactly the opposite!

Well to be honest, I am not planning on trading all that much. I have a pretty decent investment advisor, but he is always very reluctant to do the "sell high" part of the equation. His only real problem is that he tends to hang on to stuff until a winner turns into a loser and then we make only modest gains.

For example, I had about $15k in one stock, it went up by 113% over the course of about 18 months I basically had to twist his arm to sell it and park the cash until some other good prospect comes around.

So the only thing I am going to do is keep an eye on the winners and remind him that it is OK to sell when my annual return gets over 40 or 50% on a particular stock.

Dennis

Is that how you track your movements..?? :D:D

Then you can't use the best tool, which is a good discount brokerage's screen of your holdings.

FOr someone else's holdings I would just use one of the freebies out there and there are many. Morningstar has one. also I think BigCharts.com has one. Marketwatch, etc.