9 ways ShareScope helps you manage your portfolio more effectively
A vital component of successful investing is wealth preservation - limiting your losses by selling individual investments or asset classes if sentiment becomes negative. But you'll also want to know if your investments are at bargain valuations - so you can decide whether or not to buy some more. The ability to monitor the health of individual holdings easily is therefore of paramount importance.
You may also need to manage your capital gains allowance and provide information for your tax return. ShareScope will enable you to easily manage multiple portfolios and monitor your growth, income and tax objectives. You'll love it and so will your accountant.
A complete portfolio health check in 1 minute
How do you check your investments? Your broker's website probably doesn't give you much help - simply listing the size and value of your investments. You'll need to display the dedicated page for each stock or fund in order to see what other information your broker provides.
How do you tell you if the companies you are invested in are getting stronger or weaker? Are they currently undervalued or overvalued? Are your income stocks growing or at least maintaining their dividends? You should be asking yourself questions like these on a regular basis to determine whether you should sell, continue holding or buy more of the shares in each investment.
In ShareScope, create a customised table for your portfolio which includes all the information you are interested in - like % price change, news flags, valuation measures, yield and dividend cover, and broker consensus changes.
Set line alarms for important price levels
Sometimes, price charts can give us a very clear view of significant price levels. This could be key support or resistance levels, breaches of which would indicate a significant change of trend (either up or down). On this chart, the stock has stabilised around 60p after a big fall. You might have bought into this stock because your research suggested it could recover. However, if it falls below the recent low of 56p you will cut your losses and sell. In ShareScope, it takes just three clicks of the mouse to draw a line at 56p and set an alarm on it.
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Measure each portfolio against a relevant benchmark
Most investors aim to beat the market (i.e. a suitable bench-mark index). For example, if you invest in large-cap UK shares paying a good dividend your benchmark might be the FTSE UK Dividend Plus index. It may be appropriate to use a different benchmark for each of your portfolios.
In ShareScope it is easy to graph your portfolio against another index or instrument (even another portfolio). We suggest that you use a relevant market index and a relevant high-performing fund as well.
Manage portfolio diversification
Diversification is an essential component of successful portfolios.
For equity portfolios, ShareScope enables you to analyse the weighting of individual holdings in your portfolio and your sector diversification. Both tools can help you identify risk imbalances and take appropriate action. For example, a successful holding of one of the FTSE 100's mega caps may have resulted in an excessive weighting to one share or to a sector that may not perform so well in the next phase of the economic cycle.
Results can be viewed and printed as tables or pie charts.
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I would like to thank ShareScope for the capital gains tax service it provides...I have just had my accounts approved by the IR and it was all calculated and printed by ShareScope. I have looked at most of the current tax software providers, but none are as good as ShareScope.
WB, Leeds
CGT management made easy
ShareScope enables you to view and print Capital Gains reports for the current tax year or any other tax year for which you have recorded transactions (including those you have added retrospectively).
You can factor in a single CGT allowance, add a spouse's allowance or ignore the allowance, and you can carry losses forward. You can run capital gains reports for individual portfolios or group portfolios. ShareScope assumes that you have no other activities that impact your tax liability however you can make manual adjustments if this is not the case. A separate Dividends Report details all dividends received in the specified tax year. You can create a report for a specific holding within a portfolio or for the entire history of a portfolio. You can also view dividend reports for previous tax years.
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Greater transaction transparency
You may find that your broker account combines all purchases of the same share into one transaction - which means that you can no longer see the profit/loss position of each individual transaction. With ShareScope you can choose to display the individual transactions or a summary or both. You can record all your share transactions in great detail including broker commission, stamp duty and any other fees.
If you already have a portfolio, you can retrospectively record the transactions for your existing holdings so you have a complete record. You can record a wide range of transaction types and easily make adjustments for corporate actions such as rights issues, splits and consolidations.
Portfolio performance over any time period
Many investors like to keep a record of the annual performance of their portfolio(s). This can be difficult if you are unable or forget to record the value of your portfolio on the appropriate date. With ShareScope, you can view/print a report which gives you the value of a portfolio (or group portfolio) and each of its constituent stocks on any date. It will also compare the difference in values between two dates (e.g. year ends).
Arrange your holdings in multiple portfolios
We understand that many investors want to separate their investment activities into discreet funds. You might want to measure the performance of your income stocks separate to your growth stocks or your emerging market investments from your developed market holdings - particularly if you want to compare them against a suitable benchmark. Or you might want portfolios for different tax wrappers (ISAs/SIPPs); for different members of the family or investment club; for holdings in different currencies or for different investment strategies. ShareScope enables you to create an unlimited number of portfolios. You can also create Group portfolios which will summarise the value and profit/loss position of all constituent portfolios. You can rearrange your portfolios with ease at any time.
Keep track of your cash
You can create cash accounts in ShareScope to help you keep track of the cash associated with your investments. You can record credits such as lump sums, regular contributions and tax rebates. Link a cash account to a portfolio and ShareScope will automatically debit share purchases and credit the proceeds of sale transactions, dividend payments and other capital returns. You can even link cash accounts in different currencies to the same portfolio. The value of each portfolio can be displayed with or without the associated cash balance.