Tracking Your Share Investments with Sharesight

I’ve recently discovered Sharesight– although it has been around for over ten years now.

So what is Sharesight?

It’s a New Zealand company which gives investors an insight into how their share investment portfolio is performing in real-time.

I’ve always thought that there should be a better way of tracking my share performance every month. An alternative to googling “Genisis Energy Share price” every month. And now I’ve found it.

First Impressions- Tracking Your Shares

So I decided to give Sharesight a crack. It was quick and easy to sign up. Once signed up the platform is quite intuitive to find your way around. They prompted me to enter one of my holdings when I first logged on and I entered my Genesis energy shares details.

I purchased these Genesis energy shares during the government sale. I have been tracking them since I purchased them in April 2014. But I was only tracking the share price. I forgot to track the dividend payments. So, how do I know how they have been performing?

Sharesight made this so easy. All I had to do is to enter the purchase date, and the number of shares and Sharesight worked the rest out for me. It populated all the dividend payments, worked out the capital gain and total return. And it even benchmarked the performance to the NZX50- I didn’t even have to tell it to do that!

Turns out that my Genesis Energy shares have been outperforming the NZX50 for the majority of the time I have owned them. They’ve had a 23% capital gain, and a 13% dividend.

I’ll have to review all the dividend payments to make sure there correct- will have to find all those letters. And if there are any numbers that are out, which I doubt there will be, you can manually adjust them. I’m going to explore tracking some of my index funds when I get some more time.

So What Else Does Sharesight Do?

Shareshight is primarily a web app that links to different share brokers, it’s not a trading platform. It’s a DIY platform designed to replace the spreadsheet method of tracking your share performance.

I’ve done some digging through Sharesight’s help section and there are a number of other useful tools beyond just tracking your share portfolio;

• Syncing with your Broker – You can connect to your brokers to automatically imports your days trading activity into Sharesight- if your broker is supported by Sharesight.
• Performance Reports –  Sharesight allows you to report on your portfolio performance over any date range. It allows you to limit the report to open positions only, or you can change the way your holdings are grouped, of filter the report to specific holdings.
• Tax Reports – Sharesight makes completing your tax return quicker, easier and more accurate. It will organise your dividend and distribution records in preparation for filing your tax return.
• Price Alerts – You can set Sharesight to alert you to changes in stock prices so you can make informed decisions on whether to buy or sell individual holdings.
• Cryptocurrencies – currently Sharesight supports 8 cryptocurrencies so that you can track these as a part of your portfolio automatically as well.

Shareshight currently supports 28 stock exchanges and managed fund through the world- meaning data no matter what you’ve invested in the data likely be available on Sharesight, such as the price, dividends and corporate actions for holdings in your portfolio, and they will update automatically.

It’s great to see Hatch on their list of brokers too. As far as I can tell Hatch is one of the best platforms to use to get access to the US stock market directly.

Alternatives to Sharesight

There are limited alternatives to Sharesight- the main one being the humble old spreadsheet.

Don’t get me wrong- I love spreadsheets- but sometimes they just become too much.

I currently have several spreadsheets to track different aspects of my money and they’re becoming a bit unruly. Pocketsmith has definitely cut down the number of spreadsheets I use, and now Sharesight is tracking some of my investments- that number might decrease even more.

How Much Does Sharesight Cost?

It’s free!

Sharesight is free when you track up to 10 shares or funds- so for the average investor, the free version is probably enough.

When you need to track more than 10 holdings there is a subscription fee of $15 per month for 20 holdings, and there is also a subscription option for unlimited holdings.

I think that Sharesight is one of the best options out there for any investor who wants to get rid of the spreadsheets. It gives you real-time information about your portfolio- so you can easily do a monthly check on how your portfolio is going- and it’s free to use if you less than 10 holdings!

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