Stock monitoring software with alerts

[sackofspuds]

Posted this to the wrong board yesterday...

I currently monitor my portfolio in digitallook but it's pretty lousy. If I record a transaction it's likely to enter it twice for example. I realise DL has been going downhill for years but just haven't got round to changing it and I trade rarely so put up with it.

I'm having trouble finding anything to replace it with though. Getting to the stage where Google Sheets seemed my best bet. Apparently you can write a script to email you if a share price moves. Started to look more deeply into it and just paused because I knew it would end up taking hours.

Frankly I could probably put up with digitallook (the data is there already) but I'd like to set up alerts for percentage share price movements. DL does do alerts but sadly they seem unreliable.

Yahoo Finance doesn't seem to do very sophisticated alerts. Likewise Google Finance.

There are quite a few apps out there but there don't seem to be any that leap out at me.

[mrbrightside]

I use the Web based portfolio available at ft.com (requires free registration). I like this one in particular as it automatically includes dividend payments. I note that ft.com also supports email alerts on multiple criteria (thresholds, price rise/fall, percentage price change, moving average, trading volume, 52 week high/low) although I have never used them.

I also use a commercial portfolio product (https://www.stockmarketeye.com) which costs $100 and includes very detailed, comprehensive reports and also supports alerts. Tech support and updates are excellent too.

HTH - Andy

[sackofspuds]

Thanks Andy. I tried trustnet.com which seems fine. I had assumed the ft.com one required an FT subscription so knowing it's free is good.

I started entering details into trustnet.com and realised after a few entries that it was going to take me hours to complete it and that given this, I should be pretty certain about which provider to use before committing the time to doing it.

Hadn't thought about dividends. Digitallook does constantly prompt you about them. Not sure what trustnet.com does.

[Itsallaguess]

Frankly I could probably put up with digitallook (the data is there already) but I'd like to set up alerts for percentage share price movements. DL does do alerts but sadly they seem unreliable.

Yahoo Finance doesn't seem to do very sophisticated alerts. Likewise Google Finance.

There are quite a few apps out there but there don't seem to be any that leap out at me.

Have a look at the free Interactive Investor offering -

http://www.iii.co.uk/our-services/free-research-account

https://www.iii.co.uk/auth/user/login.e ... reg/wealth

The free portfolio service is great (I've been using it for years), and the free price-alerts that you can set up are also very useful.

It's certainly worth a look if you're getting no-where with anything else.

I'm not sure what it can do with regards to dividends, as that's an area I've never needed the portfolio to do for me, but hopefully it'll at least tick a couple of boxes for you.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[sackofspuds]

Have a look at the free Interactive Investor offering -

Thanks for the tip but I already spent a rainy Sunday afternoon doing data entry on the ft.com site. Ironically, I have an iii.co.uk account already - a result of their purchase of tddirect.co.uk.

The ft.com one is better than the trustnet.com one I think. Covered all my investments, even the fairly esoteric ones such as ETFS Lean Hogs ETC:
https://markets.ft.com/data/etfs/tearsh ... GS:LSE:USD

What is more, they include dividends in their Total gain/loss column for each investment which is a real eye opener. Digitallook simply prompted you to accept / decline the divi and then added it to your cash balance. Trustnet.com doesn't seem to include divis but I could be wrong.

It makes you see those HYP shares in a new light. Aviva (yeah, probably no longer an HYP share) one of the most interesting examples. As of last week I had 576 shares in Aviva worth, as of last week, about £2,840. This represented a loss of £1,135.

I bought Av in 2007. Obviously over 11 years when you add the divis I am up £320 or 8%. FT shows 732 transactions since purchase; the divis.

OK so still pretty dire even including divis but better than it first appears.

[sackofspuds]

FT shows 732 transactions since purchase; the divis.

Just to be clear, the 732 transactions were for all my shares, not just Aviva.

I think maybe FT gets data from Morningstar because if I try to add alerts to some EFTs I get an error referring to Morningstar.

FT didn't let me create alerts for my pension funds with Aegon either. Trustnet did so some mix and matching required.

Alerts are all very well but dear old digitallook seemed to send them when it felt like it. I did a test with the FT service today by putting in a price 1% higher and 1% lower on Anglo American and BHP and I duly got an email so that seemed to work. It cancelled the alert after triggering. I did notice that for percentage changes the alert is based on the last close price so only good for a profit warning type event. You can also create alerts on the price crossing the N days moving average which looked interesting. I stuck with fixed price alerts.

I also got an email alert from trustnet but it didn't seem to make much sense. Could have been my mistake.