Track Your Portfolio

For the last ten years or so I’ve been looking for a way to track my share portfolio.

The best I’ve come up with so far is using my own spreadsheet and manually updating it with the balance of each of my trading accounts. Laborious and slow. If only we had a Personal Capital type tool available in the UK like our cousins in the US. Lucky buggers always seem to have the best tech first!

To my mind the best option would be an online service that could access all my trading accounts (read only and using an authorised API, not simply pretending to be me logging in and violating the terms of usage of my trading account). At any time I would be able to get a snapshot of my current net worth, see if I’m on track to achieve FIRE,  plan for capital gains tax and lots of other lovely financial considerations.

I did use to use Google Finance, but this seems to have been mothballed. There are also various portfolio tracking tools by MorningStar and Yahoo, but they all seem to be manual entry systems that I’m not sure I have the patience for.

What I’d really love to do is track how my shares are doing compared to various indices, like the S&P 500 and the FTSE 250 and also compare these to the recommendations from share advisor services like the Motley Fool and The Barefoot Blueprint

Being a software engineer by day, I’ve often thought about building a service myself, but thinking is about as far as I have got so far (two girls under two have significantly reduced my spare coding time - in the nice-ist possible way though I should add)

Has anybody found a solution they love? Is anyone building such an automated Personal Capital type system for us poor forgotten UK investors? Is it better we are not encouraged to check the value of our shares every time we lift our phone!? - Maybe!

Seems its not only me with such frustrations