AIC Income Builder - Free Virtual Portfolio Tool

[Itsallaguess]

Given the recent news that the free AIC Income Builder pages have now become active, and knowing the importance that many of us here place on gaining income from the huge range of investment companies available to us, I thought it was going to be worth having a separate thread for it, rather than risk any off-topic conversations relating to it confusing other existing threads.

So here's a link to the new AIC Income Builder tool -

https://www.theaic.co.uk/income-finder/sign-in

Here's some of the features of the free tool -

• Create your own virtual portfolio to track the total income it paid over the year, and when.
• Fine-tune your portfolio to smooth monthly income throughout the year, ensure there are no periods without dividend payments, or shape your income to meet your needs
• View past dividends for income-paying investment companies
• Research dividend data to aid your analysis
• Find income articles, guides, videos and jargonbusters

We're very lucky to have a poster associated with this new tool here as a Lemon Fool member, and I know he's keen to hear feed-back from anyone that's interested in the tool, so those discussions would probably be better taking place on this separate dedicated thread now, if possible.

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[kempiejon]

Well ITs are a small part of my portfolio but even so I have just spent an enjoyable 20 minutes adding them to a portfolio and investigating how it works and I'd not realised until doing this how much my IT income added annual to my overall position; if I'd have guessed before doing this exercise I would have missed nearly half the income offered. I assume the greyed out companies might come at a future date,

[StOmer]

... I assume the greyed out companies might come at a future date,

Probably not unless they join the AIC.

[Parky]

Would be more useful(for me) if based on tax year rather than calendar year.

[Bialystock]

On an ipad i can only choose the first portfolio. If i try to select my second one if defaults to the last 12 months, 2018, etc drop down menu instead. I am stuck on the first portfolio which i cannot change.

This is on the Income Builder leftmost tab.

Fine on a pc though.

Anyone else with this problem? Great feature otherwise.

[BobGe]

Would be more useful(for me) if based on tax year rather than calendar year.

That's a fair point, maybe they could arrange to have a calendar switch for that?

[dmukgr]

I too enjoyed playing around with it and I'll probably use it to warn me to lookout for future payments

[seagles]

I subscribed and "played" with it. It doesn't give me much more than I get from HL to be honest. Did look nice and I would use it if the Diary function actually showed declared forward dividends. I looked at april and only JETI was shown for the 5th, but SCF and MCT seemed to be missing.

I will use this though for the forecast yield display as before I had to look at each of my holdings seperately to see these (used in a spreadsheet as the screenscrape software associated with mine uses Sharecast and that never seems to match and doesn't return MCT).

[DavidM13]

I subscribed and "played" with it. It doesn't give me much more than I get from HL to be honest. Did look nice and I would use it if the Diary function actually showed declared forward dividends. I looked at april and only JETI was shown for the 5th, but SCF and MCT seemed to be missing.

I will use this though for the forecast yield display as before I had to look at each of my holdings seperately to see these (used in a spreadsheet as the screenscrape software associated with mine uses Sharecast and that never seems to match and doesn't return MCT).

Hi Seagles,
The Dividend Diary is designed to show ALL declared dividends.

SCF has an ex-date of 4th April but it is the pay date we show on the feature. This shows up on 29th April on the diary.

Regarding MCT (Middlefield Canadian) the last dividend pay date that I see is 31st January and that is reflecting in the tool. Where are you seeing an April dividend?

[seagles]

I subscribed and "played" with it. It doesn't give me much more than I get from HL to be honest. Did look nice and I would use it if the Diary function actually showed declared forward dividends. I looked at april and only JETI was shown for the 5th, but SCF and MCT seemed to be missing.

I will use this though for the forecast yield display as before I had to look at each of my holdings seperately to see these (used in a spreadsheet as the screenscrape software associated with mine uses Sharecast and that never seems to match and doesn't return MCT).

Hi Seagles,
The Dividend Diary is designed to show ALL declared dividends.

SCF has an ex-date of 4th April but it is the pay date we show on the feature. This shows up on 29th April on the diary.

Regarding MCT (Middlefield Canadian) the last dividend pay date that I see is 31st January and that is reflecting in the tool. Where are you seeing an April dividend?

It did not show SCF on 29th yesterday, the diary only had one entry and that was JETI? MCT I had to trawl over to their own web-site for that, but they have always been a bit flaky on every site I have checked. (edited. My mistake I was looking at last years announcement which was on 5th April with dividend on 29th, so we will probably get an announcement of Aprils divi shortly)

Good tool though and thanks for letting us all know.

[DavidM13]

We will look at the ipad issue and from the other thread some sorting or averaging requests should be looked after by. e.g. Allowing a download of the data covers those requests.

Regarding the comment about a missing dividend. Ideally the data provider does not miss one, if they do there is a second round of quality assurance from the AIC which can alert the data provider to the problem, in that case it will be on the site the next business day. Not sure if this example was missed for one day or something else at play but be assured that every dividend should be on here the day after declaration or at worst two days and there are numerous checks to ensure they are.

[Peltiq]

but SCF and MCT seemed to be missing.

Middlefield Canadian's (MCT) div was declared this morning - 1.275p payable on 30th April 2019.

https://www.investegate.co.uk/middlefie ... an%20Alert

Karen

[DavidM13]

Well we better not miss it then!

ipad issue is fixed now I believe

[Steve1982]

Thanks for this new feature - its looking good.

Here are 3 little issues I spotted:

ASLI dividend payment from March 22 isn't shown.

EAT dividend values are shown as if they were pounds sterling, but the declared value was in euros, so they're somewhat inflated.

SSON can't be added to the list - its an AIC member but hasn't (yet) paid a dividend

[DavidM13]

Thanks for this new feature - its looking good.

Here are 3 little issues I spotted:

ASLI dividend payment from March 22 isn't shown.

EAT dividend values are shown as if they were pounds sterling, but the declared value was in euros, so they're somewhat inflated.

SSON can't be added to the list - its an AIC member but hasn't (yet) paid a dividend

SSON - this is not likely to pay dividends. It has an objective of capital growth so I would not expect to see this on the Income Builder unless they start paying out dividends. They may pay some to maintain IT status according to their prospectus but this is not their primary objective.

ASLI - I can see it and I haven't even fixed anything. Are you making sure you are not selecting a portfolio which doesn't contain this company to narrow it down and making it invisible to you? I see a value of 1.3p for March 22nd 2019 along with a dozen other dividends such as HICL and Henderson Opps, can you see any of them?

EAT - I believe this has just moved over from Netherlands to UK so changing their traded currency. This could lead to confusion but I am not immediately seeing a problem. For the dividend with pay date of 15th March it reported a dividend in Euro of 1.7499 EURO cents and the data provider has changed this to 1.52p which seems in line based on currency movements.

Hope that answers it but feel free to post again or even Personal Message me if you want further.

[Bialystock]

Well we better not miss it then!

ipad issue is fixed now I believe

Yes, working great on ipad now.

Thanks

[Bialystock]

Murray income pays dividends quarterly but you have it as semi annual which i think is wrong?

[Steve1982]

SSON - this is not likely to pay dividends. It has an objective of capital growth so I would not expect to see this on the Income Builder unless they start paying out dividends. They may pay some to maintain IT status according to their prospectus but this is not their primary objective.

Even with 0 current dividend, it feels "more complete" to have all my ITs together rather than have a solitary omission. I note that CGT could be added to my Income Builder list, so its not as if income is the be all & end all.

ASLI - I can see it

Now that I've found the "Select Year" option, I can see it too!

EAT - I believe this has just moved over from Netherlands to UK so changing their traded currency. This could lead to confusion but I am not immediately seeing a problem. For the dividend with pay date of 15th March it reported a dividend in Euro of 1.7499 EURO cents and the data provider has changed this to 1.52p which seems in line based on currency movements.

This might be it, although the change of domicile didn't affect the share price currency (sterling) or dividend currency (euros). My actual sterling amount in March was £197.29, rather than the listed £204.42 - a slight difference, maybe a HL conversion cost. But the January 2019 dividend has a much larger difference: Income Builder £475.06 versus £200 actual. I can't explain that difference.

Thanks again.

[DavidM13]

Middlefield - there on time, I am off the hook!

Murray - M* had it wrong. We have asked them to fix it. For now we manually over-rode it so looks fine now

SSON - if we add those with 0% yield that would add 145 companies to the tool bar and would make it harder to navigate and look out of place. CGT pays a dividend of 0.48% hence has a place. If SSON starts paying any dividend it will automatically be added. For now I can suggest the "Watchlist" functionality on the site which allows you to look at ALL your investments in one place.

EAT - I think M* may not have currency converted the January one. Checking that now.

[Bialystock]

This is a useful tool. I need to get two March/June/September/December dividend payers for my ISA on Monday.

I have 30 investment trusts in my ISA and need to balance the monthly payments for a regular retirement income when i go in the next two years, or sooner.

Not a good basis for investment, but works OK for me.