Kim Clark – Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
Kiplinger’s Money Power
Do-it-yourself investors may not have the backing of a big Wall Street firm when it comes to managing their portfolio, but plenty of free tools are available that can make it seem that way.
Here are four worth exploring.
Portfolio tracker: EquityStat. It takes only a few seconds to register for EquityStat.com. Once you’re in, you can quickly build your portfolio. Just enter the names or symbols of your stocks, bonds or funds and the date you purchased each of them. EquityStat will calculate total returns over various time frames and supply more than 30 other measures, including yield, valuation and more.
Karl Swierenga, owner of the site, says his long-term plan is to charge for some services or host ads. But he says the soonest that might happen would be December 2024.
Fund screener: Finra Fund Analyzer. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the self-regulatory body for the brokerage industry, has created a comprehensive search tool that allows you to screen for just about any type of mutual or exchange-traded fund, and you don’t have to register to explore it. Go to https://tools.finra.org/fund_analyzer, enter the kind of fund you’re looking for into the search box at the top, and Finra will search its database of some 28,000 exchange-traded products and mutual fund share classes to find a match for your terms.
You can screen the results for a variety of factors, such as management fees, minimum investment size, and ratings and classifications from research firm Morningstar. Investors can also type in the names or symbols of up to three funds to get head-to-head comparisons of fees and historical returns.
Portfolio analyzer: Portfolio Visualizer. You don’t have to register to use the free portfolio analysis tools at PortfolioVisualizer.com. The site has a lot of handy tools for testing out various portfolios. The free optimization tool, for example, will show how to adjust your holdings to reduce expected volatility.
You can also run free “Monte Carlo” simulations, which test out a portfolio’s performance over hundreds of possible economic and market environments, allowing you to estimate how long your money would last under different withdrawal scenarios. The site reserves some useful options, such as being able to save or export your optimization tests, for its paid versions.
Asset allocation: Research Affiliates Asset Allocation Interactive. Many investment research firms reserve their data and models for paying customers. Research Affiliates, however, has hosted its free tool for about a decade (https://interactive.researchaffiliates.com/asset-allocation ).
It focuses on how best to divvy your money among asset classes and investing styles, but not individual stocks, bonds or funds. The tool’s basic scatterplots and graphs don’t require a login. But you do need to register to explore other tools, such as one that shows past returns, including adjusting for inflation, of portfolios with different weightings of, say, large U.S.-based companies, small companies based in emerging markets, or various bond and commodity options. You can also view your portfolio’s expected volatility and returns according to the firm’s models.
(Kim Clark is senior associate editor at Kiplinger Personal Finance magazine. For more on this and similar money topics, visit Kiplinger.com.)
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