Update 2024. SME has closed down. The new Owner realised that he had bitten off more than he could chew. I’ve moved to Airtable and Stockopedia (see elsewhere) so I have removed all links to the Software.
It’s a shame. It was a really useful and comprehensive package.
Prior to 2015 I used to use a spreadsheet to manage my Portfolios (didn’t we all). That is quite labour intensive if it’s not a ‘Buy and forget’ type of Portfolio. Even if it is, it is still a pain to update with current prices to see how your Returns compare to your chosen index.
I have also tried some of the online Portfolio facilities provided by, for example, ADVFN. ADVFN is a fantastic site for raw information on everything and I have been a user for decades. The Portfolio Management section is not as user-friendly as many packages. I still use it pretty much daily for that nerdy blow-by-blow share price tracking, however.
In 2015 I trialled the Stockmarket Eye package (SME). This is specifically designed around Portfolio Management. You get a 30 day trial and after that it’s currently just $75 a year (about £60 at current rates). Personally, I think that’s a bargain. I’ve been subscribed since about 2016.
You can see typical reports it can produce on these pages. All the stats I have created in my Blogs have come from the Reporting features of the package.
Features that I use regularly
- Buy, sell shares. Spare splits
- Dividend recording
- Cash management recording – fees, commissions interest etc
- Multiple Portfolios and Watchlists. I have set one up for my ISA, one for my SIPP and I also have a Watchlist one. Reporting can be separate or consolidated.
- Charting. SME has live links to current and historic share prices so producing a share price chart is a doddle. You can have different styles such as Line, Candlestick etc and you can compare prices against other shares or indices.
- Reporting. See the top of this Blog or my gain/loss calculations for a typical example. All I do is set the time period and it does the rest.
- Cloud-based As long as I keep it synchronised I can access the software from my PC, my laptop or my phone (there is a free App).
- Configurability. The main display is based around each share entry and all columns can be ordered or hidden. Here’s the example from their website:
This isn’t meant to be a massive review of SME, but if you are looking at setting up and Managing a Portfolio, do take advantage of their free trial and have a play.
Reasons to buy
- Cheap at £75 a year. You can easily recoup that in time saved by not using a spreadsheet
- Highly configurable
- New ownership of the software with plenty of plans moving forwards
- Free Trial anyway – nothing to lose!
Quirks
- It would be nice if it was truly cloud-based rather than local copies that can be synchronised. Synchronisation is easy enough but it’s easy to forget to save if you make a change. A cloud-based version downloads the latest every time, and any changes get automatically saved back up to the cloud.
- The Watchlists have a subset of the columns available to the Portfolios. It would be nice to have them all, no reason why this shouldn’t be the case.
- All data are dependent on the source they are using. I have one share, for instance, where the historic data prices are a factor of 100 out where someone assumed the values were pence rather than pounds 9or vice versa). Make some charts look funny, but that is probably out of SME’s control.