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As a financial planner, I send out client investment summaries once every quarter. On these summaries I show the "book value" of the particular investment, and the "market value". I also show a breakdown of what was originally invested in each mutual fund, or stock, bond, and how many dividends or interest has been paid to each. Then I show how much has been withdrawn from each. The total of all of these makes up the "book value". This is the value that CRA would use as your "adjusted cost base" to calculate your capital gain if you decided to sell that particular investment. I then show the return that each investment has made, both in terms of dollars and percentage, from the time the original investment was made. I consider these quarterly summaries to be very detailed and informative, and it's the information that my clients want to see. However, a lot of my clients want to see this information more often than once a quarter. Most of my clients have access to the Internet, and surf it frequently. They want to be able to see how their investments are doing whenever they want. This brings me to this article's topic: "Monitoring your investments". Everyone knows that almost all investments available in Canada have their daily prices listed in the Globe and Mail and the Financial Post. In these papers you can get the previous day closing prices of all Canadian stocks publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, the Canadian Venture Exchange, the over-the-counter market, and all the unlisted stocks. As well, you can see most of the publicly traded U.S. stocks listed on the NYSE, the NASDAQ (National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations), and the AMEX. Due to the sheer number of U.S. stocks, the papers only show the stocks with the highest share volume for that particular day. As well, you can get the previous day closing prices of every mutual fund sold in Canada. Also in the daily's you can get the bid (price to buy) and ask (price to sell) price of a selection of the major bond issues in this country (Government of Canada, provincial, corporate, municipal). A complete listing of ALL Canadian bond issues is available in Monday's version of the papers (it's a slow news day). Thus, if you're one of the few who still don't have access to the Internet, you can simply take one of these publications. Find the investments that you own. Get the daily price of each, and multiply it by the number of each that you own and voila, you have your total investment portfolio value for that day. Of course, this is ridiculously time consuming and none of us have that much time. If we did, we probably wouldn't have much of an investment portfolio to worry about. This brings us to the on-line way of monitoring your investments. There are a number of great on-line tools out there to monitor your investments; such as: globeinvestor.com; ca.finance.yahoo.com; bay-street.com; quicken.ca; etc. All of these web pages have good on-line portfolio tracking devices that will update the value of your investment's every day. However, the one that I'm going to look at here is the one that I recommend to my clients, globeinvestor.com. The reason I recommend this one is because of the Globe and Mail's ability to access investment information in a timely and accurate manner. Lets face it, if it's the newspaper that most investment professionals use to access this same information, then it only makes sense that their on-line information would be just as good. It's also very user friendly. To use it, you simply go to globeinvestor.com and click on the "portfolio" tab. You'll be prompted to register with a username and password. Then you simply enter your investments into your portfolio on screen. They have a drop down list for all Canadian mutual funds and you enter the stocks by the ticker symbol. If you have a bond, just simply put in the issuer (Government of Canada, Ontario Hydro, etc.), maturity date, interest rate, and the face value of the bond, and it will give you the current market value of that bond. Once you've entered all the investments into your portfolio, it will update and total the value of your investment portfolio on a daily basis. You'll only have to enter your investments once, unless of course you buy or sell something. I believe this to be a very good service and well worth the price. FREE!!!!!!!. In this age of instant availability of information from the web, its not surprising that my clients want to know how their investments are doing more than once a quarter. |
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