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Morning Star tools? What are the most useful tools?
How many use the portfolio tracking? Is it better than what Fidelity has to offer which by the way is free to fidelity users? I find that portfolio tracking is difficult because the tracking sites cannot adjust the shares owned when a distribution is made. Prinx
M* supports both Watch style and Transaction portfolios. Watch style does not adjust distributions. Transaction portfolio is allows you to track your distributions and inflows and outflows of the funds. It can accurately draw a chart of your portfolio as opposed to the watch portfolios which calculate former values of portfolio working backwards from the final fund set and allocation. Obviously, transaction portfolio is harder to manage as you have to enter the buy and sell decisions but it allows you to easily add the distributions via a button and you can definitely override the distribution (say you did not get the full distribution from a bond fund that offers daily dividends because you did not hold the fund for the whole period)
BTW, Fidelity is changing the way they are calculating the profit/loss of fund positions in retirement accounts and they have not updated all accounts yet. Under the old scheme dividends would show up with $0 cost and so the overall profit/loss of the fund positions were correct. Now, they are showing the dividends have a cost basis and adding them to the original cost basis of the fund. So, if you have invested $10K and fund value with dividends is now $10500 and of these $500, $200 is coming from dividends. They calculate the overall return as (10500-10200)/10200 => 2.94% instead of (10500-10000)/10000 => 5% which is the correct ROI.
I am not happy with this latest change in Fidelity. If your account is not converted to this scheme yet, it will be converted some time in 2012 according to Fidelity. I have an IRA converted like this and a Roth IRA which is not converted at this time.
It's all a matter of what you want, I guess. Personally, I was never happy with the zero cost, since as you noted, it messes up the ROI. And the cost is pretty useless for tax purposes - traditional IRAs show a cost even if the money was all pre-tax. Though I'll admit that adding in the dividend costs only makes this "error" worse.
As far as tracking portfolios goes, what you're describing is Fidelity's tracking of assets held within Fidelity. For total portfolio tracking, they use (in house, they say) Yodlee software to aggregate your accounts. Unfortunately, they seem to be going backward in what they support; they recently dropped support for Treasury Direct. A year or so ago they dropped support for BNY/Mellon (a major stock custodian/servicing company). They seem to keep confusing accounts at institutions where there are multiple types of accounts (e.g. employer plans, individual investments, credit cards, etc.)
Comments
BTW, Fidelity is changing the way they are calculating the profit/loss of fund positions in retirement accounts and they have not updated all accounts yet. Under the old scheme dividends would show up with $0 cost and so the overall profit/loss of the fund positions were correct. Now, they are showing the dividends have a cost basis and adding them to the original cost basis of the fund. So, if you have invested $10K and fund value with dividends is now $10500 and of these $500, $200 is coming from dividends. They calculate the overall return as (10500-10200)/10200 => 2.94% instead of (10500-10000)/10000 => 5% which is the correct ROI.
I am not happy with this latest change in Fidelity. If your account is not converted to this scheme yet, it will be converted some time in 2012 according to Fidelity. I have an IRA converted like this and a Roth IRA which is not converted at this time.
As far as tracking portfolios goes, what you're describing is Fidelity's tracking of assets held within Fidelity. For total portfolio tracking, they use (in house, they say) Yodlee software to aggregate your accounts. Unfortunately, they seem to be going backward in what they support; they recently dropped support for Treasury Direct. A year or so ago they dropped support for BNY/Mellon (a major stock custodian/servicing company). They seem to keep confusing accounts at institutions where there are multiple types of accounts (e.g. employer plans, individual investments, credit cards, etc.)