Tracking your group investment portfolio performance
As your group investment portfolio grows, it can become increasingly harder to stay on top of things.
Deposits from members in your group trickle into your investment fund’s bank account at different intervals, making it more complicated to determine how much of the fund belongs to each person. Your groups assets end up scattered across a plethora of different brokerage platforms, and the prices of your managed funds, ETFs, and stock start bouncing all around the place.
You then begin to wonder - how much is our group investment fund actually worth? Have we even made any money?
After you’ve got your group investment fund off the ground and made your first investments, you’ll quickly find yourself wanting a way to track the performance of your portfolio.
There’s two major reasons why people track their investment portfolio:
Monitoring and iterating on your investment strategy.
Staying on top of your taxes.
When investing with mates, there’s also a third key reason:
Maintaining trust and confidence.
Monitoring and iterating on your investment strategy
At the end of the day, if we don’t know how our portfolio is performing, it kinda defeats the purpose of investing in the first place.
Without knowing how your portfolio is performing, you won’t be able to see what’s working and what isn’t, which means you won’t have any true reference points to guide improvements to your investment strategy, making it likely that you’ll miss out on a lot of the learnings that will help you become a better investor. Also, if your investment strategy isn’t working and you fail to adjust, you could be throwing money down the drain, without even realising it.
As part time investors, we typically don’t do a very good job of tracking the true performance of our investments.
It’s very easy to just look at the % loss or gains in asset prices and be fooled into thinking that our portfolio is performing positively or poorly, based on whether the % is in the positive or negatives.
In reality, the overall %loss or gains in asset prices only paint part of the picture. The true percentage increase or decrease in the value of our investments is actually impacted by a number of other factors that we often fail to account for when looking at asset prices alone, such as:
Currency gain/loss
Transaction fees
Taxes
Dividends (distributed vs reinvested)
By the time you factor these in, the true gain on your investment might look quite a bit different. Currency conversion rate can have particularly large impacts when investing in stocks listed on international markets.
As a hypothetical examples, let’s say you converted NZD to USD to buy stocks in TSLA when the exchange rate was 0.6. Let’s say you decide to sell your TSLA shares as they are now up 10%, but the exchange rate for NZD to USD is now 0.5, meaning that the value of your NZD has decreased by 10%. By selling your TSLA shares, you wouldn’t have made any gains because the 10% gain in TSLA stock price is cancelled out by the 10% currency loss.
Paying tax on your investments
As painful as it is having to deduct tax from the returns we’ve made on our investments, tax is a necessary means for holding our societies together, whether it be for educating our future generations, paying for healthcare, supporting critical infrastructure and so on.
Plus, if you’ve made a loss on your investments, you may actually be able to use this to reduce your tax bill.
In order to know how much tax you need to pay, you first need to know how much taxable income you’ve actually made. We won’t be diving into the intricacies of NZ tax laws in this article, but if you’re interested to learn more about tax on investments in NZ, we recommend checking our this article by MoneyKingz.
Maintaining trust and confidence
When investing with mates, trust and transparency is key. Firstly, everyone in your group investment fund should be able to easily see how your holdings are performing, along with being able to easily calculate the proportion of the fund you each own individually, as this is needed for you to calculate your personal returns and any tax you may be liable for.
Giving everyone in your investment group the ability to easily see how your portfolio is performing helps with strengthening confidence, because it allows everyone to see what’s working and what isn’t, giving everyone the chance to provide input on how to make your fund do better.
Secondly, you want to maintain a high level of trust when investing with mates. To start off with, if you don’t really trust your mates, you probably shouldn’t be investing with them in the first place. And even if you do hold a very high level of trust across your group of mates when investing together, you owe it to each other to be able to clearly show that the money is being invested in the assets you all agreed on.
To summarise, at Mates Rates Capital we have a number of requirements when it comes to tracking our group portfolio. These are:
Ability to easily access and view group fund performance all in one place
Ability to know the true loss/gains made on your investments
Ability to track taxable income.
Ability to track group fund cash flows by reconciling bank transactions against investments.
So how do you track your investment portfolios performance?
Tools for tracking your investment portfolio
Tracking your investment portfolio performance and staying on top of your taxes can either be done manually by relying on trusty old Microsoft Excel and Google sheets, or may be simplified by using a dedicated portfolio tracking tool.
Tracking your portfolio with Microsoft Excel and/or Google Sheets
When it comes to tracking your group investment bank account balances, Microsoft is the clear winner. That’s because it’s PowerQuery feature enables you to easily import bank statements into Excel spreadsheets from PDF files - which is super helpful for us at Mates Rates Capital because Kiwibank unfortunately only seems to provide bank statements in PDF format (seriously Kiwibank, why not just make it easier for us to download these as .CSV or .XLSX files…)
Once your bank transactions are inside Excel, it’s nice and straightforward to run some basic formulas to figure out how much each member in your fund has deposited or withdrawn. On the other hand, Google Sheets does not allow you to easily import bank transactions from PDF files, which means you’ll need to use another tool to scrape the transaction data from your bank statement PDFs, or find another bank that lets you download your bank statements in a standard .CSV format, which can then be copy and pasted into Sheets.
I’ll avoid boring you with any more detail on importing bank statements into Excel, but if you’re interested in learning how to do this you can check out the video below.
Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets can also be fantastic tools for tracking your portfolio because they offer automatic stock data feeds, plus you have the freedom to play around with formulas and configure your spreadsheets to display performance metrics that are most important to you.
However, importing transactions from different brokerage platforms needs to be done manually (that is unless you know how to write some fancy VBA or Python code that can do this for you), which can be quite tedious - especially when each brokerage platform formats your transaction reports slightly differently, which makes it harder to align all your transactions into one nicely laid out sheet in Excel or sheets for you to then calculate portfolio balances. This means you’ll need to do quite a bit of groundwork before you can even get started automating the tracking of your portfolio in Excel or Sheets.
Another challenge with building your own custom portfolio tracker inside Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets is the fact that you’re going to be the one that needs to fix things when they break, which can be an absolute nightmare if you have a lot of complicated formulas linking different cells together. A simple mis-spelt formula, or an incorrectly used symbol (i.e. forgetting to add a negative sign), can leave you scratching your head for hours, which is pretty frustrating if you’re anything like us and find yourself running into these problems a lot.
Also, while the freely available stock data feeds in Excel and Sheets do a pretty impressive job of being able to easily pull information about most of your holdings into one spreadsheet (i.e. open price, closing price, industry sector, stock exchange and so on), Excel and Sheets do not have data feeds for most managed funds and ETFs listed on the likes of InvestNow and Kernel Wealth. As a result, if your investment group holds a mixture of individual stocks, along with some managed funds on InvestNow and Kernel, you’re probably not going to be able to get an up-to-date balance of your portfolio inside Excel or Sheets, unless you manually update the prices of your managed funds yourself - and finding this pricing data isn’t always easy.
Therefore, while Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets are very useful tools for analysing your portfolios performance, they don’t quite tick enough of the boxes for tracking our group investments, mainly due to the time and effort required to maintain a custom portfolio, along with the lack of available data on certain assets.
Tracking your portfolio with dedicated off-the-shelf tools
In the section below we’ve compiled a list of dedicated portfolio tracker tools.
Note: All pricing is displayed in NZD. For plans denominated in USD, the cost was converted to NZD on the 25th November at an exchange rate of USD:NZD = 1.60.
Seeking Alpha - Basic portfolio tracker. Nice addition to the professional analyst research and educational content offered on the Seeking Αlpha platform.
Portfolio tracker is free. Premium plan starting at $67 NZD/month.
Integrates with Interactive Brokers and a range of other platforms for automatically importing trades via Plaid.
Does not support many Managed Funds and ETFs listed on Kernel Wealth, InvestNow.
Does not calculate currency conversion gain/loss, fees or taxes. Premium plan provides access to analyst research and real time alerts.
Yahoo Finance - Basic portfolio tracker. Nice addition to the other great features offered by Yahoo finance, such as their financial news, stock screeners, watch-lists, and market data.
Portfolio tracker is free.
Trades must be manually entered or imported via CSV file.
Does not support many Managed Funds and ETFs listed on Kernel Wealth, InvestNow.
Does not calculate currency conversion gain/loss, fees or taxes.
Ticker Trader. Basic portfolio tracker. Built by a member of the r/stocks community on reddit.com.
Portfolio tracker is free.
Trades must be manually entered.
Sharesight. Cloud based portfolio tracker. Offers in-depth portfolio performance tracking and tax reporting, including currency conversion gain/loss, fees and dividends received.
Free for tracking up to 10 holdings. Paid plans starting at $19 NZD/month.
Supports tracking of Managed Funds and ETFs listed on Kernel Wealth and InvestNow.
Integrates with Interactive Brokers and a range of other platforms. Provides ability to automatically import trades via FTP.
Comprehensive tax reporting for NZ investors, such as calculating taxable income from dividends and Foreign Investment Funds (FIFs).
Morningstar Direct. Subscription includes Sharesight’s Investor portfolio tracker, which costs $29 NZD/month when purchased individually. Additionally, you get access to Morningstar professional analyst research, quantitative fair value estimates and forecasts.
$56 NZD/month (or $400 NZD/year).
Includes Sharesight’s Investor portfolio tracker (see above for more details).
Supports tracking of Managed Funds and ETFs listed on Kernel Wealth and InvestNow.
Ziggma. Cloud based portfolio tracker. Allows you to track portfolios of investing gurus such as Warren Buffet and Ray Dalio.
7-day free trial. Premium plan for $11.95 NZD/month
Integrates with Interactive Brokers and a range of other platforms for automatically importing trades via Plaid.
Does not support many Managed Funds and ETFs listed on Kernel Wealth, or InvestNow.
Does not calculate currency conversion gain/loss, fees or taxes.
Kubera. Cloud based portfolio tracker. Track global bank accounts, stock investments, crypto, DeFi, physical assets and liabilities all in one place.
14-day trial for $1.60 Personal plans starting at $240 NZD/year.
Integrates with Interactive Brokers and a range of other platforms for automatically importing trades via Plaid.
Integrates with NZ bank accounts using APIs developed by Akahu. (Note: Please be aware of your banks terms of service before connecting your bank account to Kubera’s platform.)
Supports funds listed on Kernel Wealth. Does not support funds listed on InvestNow.
Summary of portfolio tracking tools
After playing around with some of the portfolio trackers above, we immediately discovered that most didn’t really cut it for our group investing needs.
To begin with, many of the free portfolio trackers, such as Yahoo Finance, Seeking Αlpha and Ticker Trader do not track currency % loss or gains and transaction fees, making them a little limited when it comes to assessing the true performance of your portfolio.
Additionally, the majority of portfolio tracking tools we analysed simply could not be used to easily track all our investments in one place.
As a group investment fund based in NZ, we use a number of different platforms to buy and sell assets, such as Interactive Brokers, InvestNow and Kernel Wealth. Therefore, we need a portfolio tracker that allows us to track the performance of assets from all our investing platforms - which is surprisingly easier said than done.
The majority of portfolio tracking tools we analysed do not currently provide automatic price feeds for Managed Funds and ETFs listed on InvestNow and Kernel. This group of portfolio trackers included Seeking Alpha, Yahoo Finance, Ticker Trader, and Ziggma.
In fact, the only portfolio tracking tool that allows us to easily analyse the performance of our managed funds and ETFs from InvestNow and Kernel, alongside the rest of the stocks in our portfolio was Sharesight.
Also, Sharesight is the only portfolio tracking tool we found that could be used to accurately track taxable income from dividends and foreign investment funds, which will certainly save a lot of headaches come tax time.
We all want to know how much we’ve each contributed to the fund, and how much we can take home ourselves. To do this, Sharesight can allow you to keep track of how much each person has deposited into your fund through its integration with Xero. This is great if you already use Xero to keep track of your investments, but for many of us, paying an additional $31+/month for Xero probably isn’t going to be worth it. You’d be better off just tracking your bank deposits and withdrawals in an excel spreadsheet.
The only other portfolio tracking tool that allows you to reconcile your investments against your bank balance is Kubera. To connect you bank to Kubera, you need to enter your bank access number and password into the Kubera platform via a company called Akahu. This functions similarly to the payment processor Poli, which you may be familiar with using when booking flights.
Currently, we’re given the impression that entering bank details into third party payment vendors such as Akahu and Poli could be a breach of the terms of service for most major banks. With this in mind, we’ll probably avoid using Kubera to reconcile our bank balances against our portfolio until we’ve done a bit more research around the security of their platform.
As you’ll see from the table above, there are two options when it comes to using Sharesight to track your portfolios performance; 1) The standalone Sharesight subscription starting at $19 NZD/month, or 2) The Morningstar Investor subscription, which includes Sharesights Investor plan for $400 NZD/year.
Having Sharesight’s $29 NZD/month subscription included in Morningstar’s Investor plan is a pretty sweet deal - but it certainly takes a pretty huge hit on the wallet. We’re big fans of the comprehensive research produced by Morningstar’s team of professional analysts, so we’re happy to pay the extra, but this probably won’t be necessary for more casual investors.
Should I use a dedicated portfolio tracker tool?
But do you actually need to use a dedicated portfolio tracker tool and are they worth the cost?
To determine whether it is worth paying for a portfolio tracker, you’ll need to consider:
Purpose of your investment fund.
Total portfolio value.
Number of investment platforms used.
Number of assets owned.
Proportion of fund owned by each person.
Ability to impact fund performance.
Purpose of your investment fund
Understanding the purpose of your group investment fund and the goals you want to achieve will be the primary driving force for determining whether it is worth paying for a portfolio tracker.
If your investment funds primary goal is to maximise gains on your investments, paying for a subscription to use a portfolio tracker might not be worth it, as the money spent on the subscription might be better spent by investing it back into your group fund.
This being said, you’ll also want to balance cost vs convenience.
Cost: How much does the software cost in proportion to the amount of money you invest?
Convenience: How much time would it take you to manually track your portfolio and do your taxes?
Convenience is key when it comes to investing. We’re already extremely busy with work, hobbies, friends, family, sport and whatever else we might have on, so spending hours of your day calculating how your investments are doing probably isn’t going to be on the top of the priority list, which could make it very much worth it to pay for a portfolio tracker that does all the heavy lifting for you.
Total portfolio value
While it’s good to try out new tools that may help you achieve your investment goals, at the end of the day it needs to make sense from a financial standpoint. If you start out with 4 people in your investment group, each who contribute $10 NZD per month to your group investment fund, it’s probably not going to be worth paying for a $56 NZD/month subscription to Morningstar Direct as this is will be costing you more than your combined total investment of $40 NZD/month.
Number of investment platforms used
If you make all your investments from a single brokerage platform, such as Interactive Brokers, Investnow or KernelWealth, you might not need to use a paid portfolio tracker tool as you will be able to simply use the in built investor reporting features from inside these platforms.
However, in most cases we will likely find ourselves investing on multiple different platforms depending on the specific asset types and funds available on each. For example; Interactive Brokers allows us to buy stocks in companies on sharemarkets from all over the world, such as Australia, Europe, U.S, Japan, and many more, but if we want to buy portfolio investment entity funds (PIE) funds, which are managed funds in NZ that have tax capped at 28%, we use InvestNow or Kernel Wealth.
It’s great having so many different brokerage platforms available to us. But there’s a slight catch - as soon as you’ve made multiple investments on different platforms, it becomes a lot harder to get an overall view on the cumulative value and performance of your investment portfolio . This is because each brokerage platform only reports on the investments you hold on that particular platform, which means you’ll need to find a way to add up the value of your investments from each brokerage platform if you want an overall picture of your fund’s performance.
Number of assets owned
This one’s pretty self explanatory; the more assets you hold, the more challenging it becomes to track them. If you only invest in one or two managed funds, you probably won’t need a dedicated portfolio tracker as it will be easy enough to monitor these investments manually.
Proportion of fund owned by each person
If you’ve set up your investment fund as a partnership, your partnership agreement will likely have specified that the value of the fund belonging to each partner will be weighted according to the amount they have invested, or something along those lines.
In order to determine what proportion of your investment portfolio is owned by each member of your group investment fund, you’ll likely need to reconcile your bank transactions (deposits/withdrawals) against your portfolio balance. This basically just means calculating how much each person has deposited or withdrawn from the fund, then figuring out what proportion of the investment fund they own for themselves.
Ability to impact fund performance
To realise gains on your investments or avoid major losses, you’ll need to know when to exit these investments - and to figure out the right time to exit your investments, it certainly helps to know how they’ve been performing. We definitely don’t want to fall into the trap of constantly buying high and selling low.
This being said, portfolio trackers are designed to analyse current and historical portfolio performance, which doesn’t predict future performance.
However, what an investment tracker does do is help you to mitigate risk in your portfolio. By being able to see the quantity of assets, gains or losses and types of assets in your portfolio (i.e. proportion in each industry sector) you can better diversify your portfolio and potentially rebalance it as you see fit.
Conclusion
Starting a group investment fund with mates can accelerate capital growth and enable you to build a well diversified portfolio at a surprisingly rapid rate.
It’s important to keep a finger on the pulse of your group portfolios performance and regularly check its health.
Fortunately there are a lot of great tools out there for tracking your portfolio. But with such an overwhelming selection of tools, it can be hard figuring out which ones are the best to use.
At Mates Rates Capital, the undisputed winner in the portfolio tracker department is Sharesight.
Most portfolio tracker tools fall short when it comes to being able to analyse the performance of all your investments in one place.
With Sharesight, we’re able to easily track managed funds and ETFs we hold on InvestNow and Kernel Wealth, alongside all the other stocks we hold on Interactive Brokers. And the best part - Sharesight has fantastic reporting features for calculating taxable income from dividends and foreign investment funds (FIFs), which makes life so much easier when keeping on top of your group investment fund admin.
The one downside of using a dedicated portfolio tracking tool such as Sharesight is the cost. Sharesight starts off with being free for your first 10 investments, but then quickly jumps up to $19/month or $29/month, depending on how many investments you hold.
As nice as it would be to utilise Sharesight’s integration with Xero to figure out how much each member of our fund has invested, this would add an extra cost that simply isn’t worth it for us at this stage. Instead, we prefer to just use Microsoft Excel to keep tabs on our bank transactions, which allows us to track who owns what.
At the end of the day, you’re always going to need some level of portfolio tracking. We don’t want to wake up one day to find the tax man knocking at our door, or find that some of our investments are now worthless because we weren’t keeping a close enough eye on them.
The question is, how can you make this easy and affordable?
To answer this, just get out there, have a play with the different tools and see what works best for you. Good luck!
About us
Here at Mates Rates Capital, we’re just a group of mates trying our hand at investing by pooling together a small amount of our hard earned wages each week.
We started Mates Rates Capital as a project to share our tips, tricks, mistakes, and learnings so that you can go start a group investment fund and reap the rewards of investing with friends.
Come along for the ride! 🤙
Legal stuff
The content shared in this article is based on the opinions of Mates Rates Capital and is not financial advice. Any information shared is only current at the time of writing and is provided without consideration of the financial situation of any individual person. Always do your own research. You should consider seeking legal, financial, taxation or other advice before making any investment decisions.
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