Software That Can Help Take Stock of Portfolios
You’re a mutual fund investor and you want to know the return on your fund.
Can you just rely on the performance figures supplied by the fund company or can you calculate a more accurate number for your specific holdings?
For the record:
12:00 a.m. March 26, 1998 For the Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday March 26, 1998 Home Edition Business Part D Page 3 Financial Desk 2 inches; 51 words Type of Material: Correction
Portfolio software--Because of incorrect information provided by the American Assn. of Individual Investors, a story Tuesday listed the wrong price for Centerpiece 5.0 portfolio management software. The correct price is $2,995. Also, the Captool 5.1 DOS program is no longer being shipped, but its successor, a Windows-based program, is available for $254.
The answers are yes and yes.
Most buy-and-hold investors simply want to know whether their funds are leading or lagging the market. For them, the performance data from fund companies are fine. They can be used to compare the return of one fund with another or with a market benchmark such as the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.
But a fund company’s numbers often don’t match the exact returns you’re earning. Why? Because their figures assume that no money is withdrawn from, or added to, the account during the year. And that’s often not the case. Many investors, for example, have automatic monthly contributions made to their mutual funds.
How do you figure out your precise return for a given period? Your best bet is to use one of a handful of computer software programs that do the math for you.
Five of the six computer programs listed below are “full-fledged portfolio management systems,” said John Bajkowski, editor of the Computerized Investing newsletter published by the American Assn. of Individual Investors in Chicago. For investors who faithfully record the activity in their brokerage accounts or mutual funds, the programs will perform a wide range of record-keeping and analysis, including tabulating investment returns.
“They’re going to tell you how your portfolio is doing over time, how an individual investment is performing and also will give you the relative performance of a benchmark,” he said.
An investor who wants to eschew broader portfolio-tracking in favor of a program that focuses on performance calculations may be interested in the sixth program, Easy ROR. The other programs make it tough to figure a return if an investor hasn’t recorded every transaction as it has happened, Bajkowski said. It’s far simpler with Easy ROR, he said.
The programs sampled by AAII:
* Captool 5.1. Price: $154, from Captools Co. Phone: (800) 826-8082. World Wide Web address: https://www.captools.com
* Centerpiece 5.0. $29.95, from Performance Technologies Inc. (800) 528-9595 or https://www.centerpiece.com
* Investor’s Accountant 5.0. $395, from Hamilton Software. (800) 733-9607.
* Portfolio Analyzer 5.0. $99, from Hamilton Software. (800) 733-9607.
* Quicken ’98. Basic version: $34.95; deluxe version: $44.95. From Intuit Inc. (800) 446-8848 or https://www.quicken.com
* Easy ROR. $59, from Hamilton Software. (800) 733-9607.
(Times staff writer Walter Hamilton is not related to Hamilton Software.)
