Ted’s Rants and Raves by Ted M. Young

MarketWatch recently released a major upgrade to their portfolio tracking web application. Based on some reviews I’ve read elsewhere (including the one at TechCrunch), I decided that I should take a look. I currently use Google Finance’s portfolio for tracking my stocks because it made it easy to import my list of stocks by pasting in a CSV (comma-separated values) file into an input box. Unfortunately it has some glitches, such as not reporting the price of Nintendo correctly (though it uses the correct price for calculating the actual value of my shares), and no customization, and no charting.

Here’s Google’s quote for Nintendo:

Notice that the price (which should be the closing price of 76.10, since this was quoted well after the market closed) is the same as the opening price, 74.90, which is wrong. The fact that this is an ADR (American Depository Receipt) quoted on the “pink sheets” is no excuse:

And here’s Yahoo’s quote for Nintendo (taken within minutes of the Google snapshot)

Sure, Yahoo Finance could use a bit of a facelift in terms of layout, but at least they get the quotes right:

So, Yahoo gets the quotes right, but their portfolio system is really old — I don’t think it’s changed that much in the past 5 years (if not longer). Needless to say, it offers no importing of information, so I while I use it as my main quote source (delayed, of course, like all free quote sources), and for the news links (much more comprehensive than Google, if not overly so), it doesn’t serve my portfolio tracking needs. And, as I mentioned already, Google’s portfolio doesn’t have much in the way of features and is underwhelming in the news links area, which is especially surprising since they could just pull in the feeds from Google News.

Not Moving To MarketWatch’s Portfolio Tracker

When I first went to the new MarketWatch “My Portfolio”, it asked me if I wanted to import my old portfolio. I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but I figured I’d say yes and see if it provided some way to import a portfolio from other web sites or at least from a file like Google Finance does. Alas, no: it was only for importing a portfolio that I might have already had on MarketWatch. Since I didn’t have one — though I wasn’t sure at first — it couldn’t import anything. I then looked around and couldn’t find any option for importing an existing portfolio. Since I wasn’t about to re-enter the information contained in my portfolio: number of shares, purchase price and date, commission, etc., I pretty much stopped there. Because there was no sample portfolio (which would have shown off its features), I entered a few stocks just to see how it looked (and I’ll have a closer look at the user interface soon), but there’s nothing I hate more than having to duplicate work that I’ve already done. And this could have been so easily avoided by providing a way to upload a spreadsheet (in either CSV, Excel, or OpenOffice format — or even all three!) or a pasted HTML table, i.e., one that I could have copied from another site. A fancy AJAX-based data-oriented web application doesn’t help if you haven’t thought about how a user is going to get their data into your application.

Oh well. Though it does open the door for a web-based service that could move your portfolio data around from site to site or even from, say, Quicken to Google Finance. Hmmm.