Use of Google Finance to track your Equity portfolio
The investment culture in India is shifting from saving to investing. The instruments are shifting from tangible assets like gold, real estate to intangible assets like stocks. The investment gurus are suggesting mutual funds as the option to take to investing, but they are also suggesting to invest in some good stocks if you do understand - with a medium to long term horizon to get appreciation of your investment.
But even if you do invest in good stocks, how do you measure the growth or appreciation in the invested stocks? It is one thing to read newspapers or reports giving out growth numbers; but another to do that calculation on your own.
Add to it how do you track and record all the corporate actions? No doubts your DP / broker gives you such reporting tool. But does reporting tool provide the flexibility to do the analysis? Also every time you have log-in to the live system which is not a good option.
Google Finance portfolio tracker
I attempted to enter stock data manually in a spreadsheet but I found Google Portfolio tracker offers the following benefits.
Firstly it allows you to import a spreadsheet with basic trade data (date, amount and numbers) and that's it. It adds all corporate actions automatically in the background and gives you the complete report at a stock or at a portfolio level that has multiple stocks in it. Secondly for the stock it offers all the news and comparisons with its peers. So you can keep yourself abreast with the developments in the stock. Thirdly it offers choice of Indian Rupee as a currency. Last but not the least, you can export your portfolio in spreadsheet format.
I did come across errors where it couldn't handle corporate actions involving dividend plus special dividend and bonus offers resulting in fractions where It didn't round-off.
But on the balance it is easy and intuitive to use like any Google product. Since most of us have a Google account, you may want to try it.