Money management is viewed by many as a very boring task. In many cases it’s too time consuming to track all your investments over the last few years as you have to do a lot of things manually month on month. You can make it easy by using money management tools.
In situations such as these, top online money management tools are of great help. There are tools out there as well while there are some that charge.
Let us look at one of them today, Valueresearchonline.com but before we do, let us see why such tools are required in the first place.
What to expect from online money management tools
While you can use a home based tool to manage your money – say pen and a paper or excel sheet or your computer , how would you integrate data from your bank accounts, credit cards, insurance policies, stocks and mutual funds to keep track of your overall portfolio ?
With a pen and paper it is literally impossible to update the current values of stock and mutual funds on a daily basis. With an excel it might be easy but could be time consuming as you are looking at doing it manually.
Even with the excel sheet, you might need to be smart to pull up reports and charts, say for calculating the personal net worth. Analysis of income and expenses is also something which will require data from savings accounts and credit cards each month.
And if you looking to do cash-flow planning based on goal based investing for your overall financial planning, then it is simply impossible to do so for a layman using these home grown tools.
Free online tools are available at your disposable to do all of these. Be aware that not all of them will offer the things you are looking for – so you need to do due diligence before you get locked in.
Once you decide to go with one, you are simply married to it and like a husband, you find it difficult to leave !
Most of these sites will offer to house and analyze your data – some can even analyze and track stocks and mutual funds while others will not as they are simply meant to manage your money. But most of them will do these for you :
Pull data online from you savings accounts, credit cards.
Store all data about all your investments.
Update real time current values of stocks and equities.
Update all actions like buy/sell equity; swipe your credit card; withdraw money from ATM.
Compute tax.
Provide alerting for EMI and other payments.
Calculate returns for each product.
Provide overall portfolio in different views.
We will keep talking about these tools in our future articles as well. Let’s move over to checking out our first tool.
Valueresearchonline.com
Valueresearchonline.com is the master of mutual fund research since 1990. It offers free sign-up. The free version lets you add any kind and number of mutual fund, any number of stocks and bonds and deposits. The additions have to be done manually which can be quite a pain.
Valueresearchonline.com cannot automatically pull data from all your accounts so additions have to be done manually.
After adding these, you can see real time portfolio personal net worth or market value every day with a percentage weight of each product in your portfolio. Top 15 equity and debt holdings with value and percentage is shown along with which sectors the equity holdings have an exposure to, and what ratings and products the debt instruments are in.
The overall 9 box snapshot of your entire portfolio also lets you see where you money is currently parked. See below.
The analysis of your portfolio is also very informative. You get to see the annualized return of each of your investments and the realized or unrealized gain/loss of each of them.
A snapshot of capital gains is provided. Ability to compare with various indexes is provided and the highest and lowest NAV of the mutual funds you have invested in is also provided.
The biggest USP is that loads of information on a particular mutual fund is provided, including performance of a week to 5 years, fund style, P/E ratio, P/B ratio.
You have the ability of exporting your data to excel. You can create a maximum of 5 portfolios only and the overall comprehensive snapshot of the 5 portfolios is not shown – so its the individual 5 portfolios one can look at.
The downside is that the financial planning aspect of an investor is not taken care of as well. There are no graphs or reports one can pull out. You cannot analyze your monthly income and expenses. And retirement planning is not catered to at all.
In that sense, Valueresearchonline.com is more of a portfolio tracker (tracking stocks and mutual funds).
So if you were to use this tool, you would still need your financial planner. But that is a generic statement we should make. A personal financial planner cannot be replaced by a tool – a tool is merely helping you manage your money.
What is your take on this tool ?
Mayura,
Thanks for the detailed explanation on Valueresearch. I have been using their tool for over 5 years and am very much satisfied.
Rakesh
@Rakesh, Thanks. Valueresearchonline is indeed a very good tool and can be used by the layman in a very constructive way. If they increase they offerings as mentioned, it will be great. Glad you liked it.
Yup, Valueresearchonline is having a great tool one should not miss to track/analyse their mutual fund and stock related investment.
@Chirag, Thanks Chirag for your feedback.
If valueresearchonline is only tracking stocks and MFS, is there any other tool that can track complete portfolio? There are a number of impressive features mentioned in this article that an online money management tool could do. Which are those tools and are there any free ones available as well?
@Vivek K, Another article probably ! I have the list though.
@Radhey Sharma, I think I should stop asking you for articles for some time now, already created lot of backlog for you :).
@Vivek,
Perfios, Arthamoney, Moneysights are few of them. I just did a cursory level test of these.
@Rakesh, Thanks Rakesh, will try them out.
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