5 ways to get the portfolio insights you need

How has your portfolio performed so far this year? Is it doing well or poorly because of the individual stocks you picked, or is it down to your asset allocation? Do you even know? The following Sharesight features will help you easily compare and contrast the winners and losers in your portfolio -- so you can understand what happened, and make informed decisions going forward.

1 -- Benchmarking

How did your portfolio perform compared to the overall market this year? Find out with Sharesight’s Benchmarking feature, which lets you benchmark your entire portfolio (or an individual holding) against any stock, ETF, or fund. In this example, we can see that this particular portfolio performed extremely well compared to Vanguard’s Diversified High Growth Index ETF (ASX: VDBA):

2 -- Custom Groups

Leveraging Sharesight’s Custom Groups feature is a great way to organise your portfolio according to your preferred asset allocation methodology. Personally, I find it to be a great way to organise my holdings which are domiciled in Australia, Canada and the US, but actually track Australian, Canadian, global, and emerging markets:

3 -- Diversity Report

Does your investment portfolio match your appetite for risk? Sharesight’s Diversity Report provides a visual breakdown of your portfolio by various default groupings such as Market, Sector, Investment Type, Country, as well as any Custom Groups you’ve set up:

4 -- Contribution Analysis Report

Sharesight’s Contribution Analysis Report takes asset allocation a step further by visually showing you the drivers behind your portfolio performance. Again, you can view this report by default groupings such as Market, Sector, Investment Type, Country, as well as any Custom Groups you’ve set up. In this example, we can see that Consumer Services (and more specifically Retail Food Group) were the major source of losses, and Health Technology provided the biggest gains:

5 -- Consolidated Views

If you want to see the overall performance of multiple portfolios -- perhaps across your SMSF and personal portfolios, or your portfolio along with those of your spouse and children -- you can combine them using Consolidated Views. This allows you to review the Portfolio Overview, Performance Report, Contribution Analysis Report, and Diversity Report of the combined portfolios, and also allows you to group the data by the default groupings, your Custom Groups, or by the individual portfolios that make up the Consolidated View:

Want more insights?

• Share your portfolio -- Another way to gain insights into your portfolio is by securely sharing your portfolio with your accountant and/or financial advisor. With all your portfolio data in one place, they’ll have everything they need to provide additional insights to you -- not just at tax-time but throughout the year.

• Enable email alerts -- Stay on top of any changes to your portfolio by subscribing to weekly portfolio summaries, as well as price and company alerts.

Save by claiming your Sharesight subscription

While many of these premium features are available exclusively on Sharesight Investor or Expert plans, in most cases, Australian tax residents can claim their subscription fee when they upgrade to to a paid plan¹. And as a bonus, when you pre-pay for an annual subscription, you get 1 month FREE!

FURTHER READING

• Offset your capital gains by tax loss selling
• Get on top of your FY2017-18 corporate actions
• 7 reasons to upgrade Sharesight

Important Disclaimer: We do not provide tax advice. Make sure you seek appropriate tax advice before implementing the ideas in this post.
¹If you derive income from the sharemarket, your Sharesight subscription may be tax deductible. Check with your accountant for details.