Why Sharesight is the best multi-asset portfolio tracker

If you invest across different asset classes, markets, currencies and brokers, you need a portfolio tracker that gives you the tools to track the price and performance of all your investments in one place. With Sharesight, you can track over 750,000 global stocks, ETFs, funds, cryptocurrencies, unlisted assets and more, allowing you to manage your multi-asset investments with ease. Whatever you need — you can Sharesight that. In this article, we’ll explore how Sharesight helps you stay on top of your portfolio, optimise your performance and set yourself up for a successful year of investing.

Track all of your investments in one place

The first step to success is to ensure all of your investments are recorded in Sharesight, whether that means importing trades in stocks, ETFs, funds (and more) from your broker; syncing a cash account; inputting self-managed retirement funds or employee stock options; or manually recording unlisted assets such as real estate and collectibles. Sharesight supports data imports from over 200 global brokers, along with support for 60+ leading global markets and hundreds of different currencies (including leading cryptocurrencies), making it easy to keep track of your multi-asset investments and get the insights you need to evaluate your strategy and make better investing decisions.

Gain insights with advanced reporting tools

Maybe it’s the start of the year and you’re ready to refresh your investing strategy, or perhaps you’re part-way through and considering a portfolio rebalance due to shifting market conditions. Whatever the timing, understanding your portfolio’s asset allocation and diversification is a crucial first step to optimising your performance.

Establish your asset allocation

Before you make any decisions about your portfolio, it’s a good idea to take stock of your investments and gain a clear picture of your asset allocation. To determine your asset allocation, you can run Sharesight’s diversity report, which shows how your portfolio is diversified across different investment types, markets, countries, industries and sectors. You also have the option to create your own custom groups that reflect your specific investment strategy or asset allocation target.

By running the diversity report, you can see a clear breakdown of your portfolio’s asset allocation.

Once you have determined your asset allocation, you can run the contribution analysis report to see how your asset classes are performing relative to each other. This can be done over the time period of your choice, and is a good way to evaluate the success of your investment strategy and see whether you need to rebalance your portfolio.

The contribution analysis report makes it easy to see how your different asset classes have performed relative to each other over your chosen period.

Identify your risk profile

If you’re looking to change your strategy and do some more in-depth analysis, you can also identify risky assets in your portfolio with the drawdown risk report. The report uses the return over maximum drawdown (RoMaD) metric to show you the risk-adjusted performance of your investments (and your portfolio as a whole), giving you the ability to compare the relative riskiness of one investment to another. This will help you establish the risk profile of the investments in your portfolio and make rebalancing decisions based on your risk tolerance.

In this example, you can see the portfolio has a relatively balanced risk profile, with investments in the upper left quadrant indicating they are low-risk, high-return, while investments in the lower right quadrant indicate they are high-risk, low-return.

Avoid overlapping assets in your portfolio

If you’re an ETF investor, another useful portfolio rebalancing tool is Sharesight’s exposure report. The report displays your portfolio’s exposure to different industries, investment types and sectors by listing your direct stock holdings alongside any stocks held within exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This allows you to clearly identify any overlap in your portfolio, making it easier to diversify your portfolio by shedding any redundant stocks or ETFs.

The exposure report shows you the composition of your portfolio, including holdings that you own directly or as part of your ETFs’ underlying holdings, helping you avoid overlap in your holdings.

Note: The diversity, contribution analysis and drawdown risk reports are all available on investor and expert plans. The exposure report is available on starter, investor and expert plans.

These are just a few of the reports you could use to optimise your performance. Some other key reporting tools include:

• Performance report: Clearly compare the performance of different assets in your portfolio over the time period of your choice. This is particularly useful if you have multi-asset portfolios and global investments, as it allows you to clearly see the cumulative impact of capital gains, dividends, foreign currency and brokerage fees on your returns.
• Multi-period: View your portfolio’s returns over up to five distinct or cumulative periods. By comparing distinct or custom periods, you can clearly assess investment decisions against events such as market corrections, individual asset corrections or portfolio rebalancing.
• Multi-currency valuation: See the value of every investment in your portfolio denominated in both the currency it is traded in, as well as its value when converted to any of the currencies that Sharesight supports. This is useful if you are a global investor who needs this information for tax purposes, or if you simply ‘think’ in a different currency than what your investments are denominated in.
• Future income: View all (announced) upcoming dividends for your portfolio. This is useful if you are looking to plan your cash flow, especially if you are in the retirement phase, for example, and are relying on your dividend income.

We also have a range of tax reporting tools, such as taxable income, capital gains tax and unrealised capital gains tax, which can help you save time and money at tax time. You can learn more about our tax reporting tools here.

Benchmark your portfolio’s performance

Once you’ve evaluated your investment strategy and made any necessary adjustments to your portfolio, it’s a good time to start tracking your portfolio against a benchmark. By benchmarking your portfolio against an index-tracking ETF, for example, you can track your portfolio against market trends. This allows you to determine whether your portfolio’s performance can be attributed to market conditions or your own investment decisions.

You can benchmark your portfolio against any one of the 750,000+ stocks, ETFs, funds and unit trusts Sharesight supports. Simply click ‘Add benchmark’ on your portfolio’s Overview page and select the instrument that best reflects your asset allocation or investing strategy. As can be seen from the screenshot below, Sharesight makes it easy to see where your portfolio diverges from the benchmark. In this case, for example, you may decide to alter your investing strategy or even invest your money in the benchmark ETF rather than continuing to pick stocks.

An example of an investment portfolio that is underperforming and diverging from its chosen benchmark.

Automatically capture all your dividends and distributions

If you invest in dividend-paying assets, it’s important to have a way to keep track of all your dividend and distribution statements throughout the year. You could manually keep track of them in a spreadsheet, or spend time checking the various share registries that your investments belong to, but the ability to automatically track them in one place makes staying on top of your dividend income much easier. This is important if you rely on dividend income throughout the year, and especially when tax time rolls around and you are expected to report your earnings in detail.

With Sharesight, dividends and distributions are automatically tracked in your portfolio, including dividend reinvestment plans (for AU and NZ investors). Once you’ve added all your investments to Sharesight and set up any DRPs you may have, all you need to do is log into Sharesight and verify and accept your dividend and distribution payments as they come in.

As mentioned above, another useful feature for dividend investors is Sharesight’s future income report (available on investor and expert plans), which allows you to see all of your upcoming announced dividends. This makes it easy to keep track of your monthly dividend income and project short-term cash flow.

The future income report is designed to help you keep track of upcoming dividends (as shown above), but you can also run it over past periods to give you a consolidated record of all the dividends you have received.

The takeaway

Staying organised is key to managing a multi-asset portfolio, and Sharesight’s portfolio tracker makes it effortless. With support for global markets, multiple asset classes, and advanced reporting tools, you can track performance, benchmark returns and gain deeper insights — all in one place. Whether you’re doing an annual portfolio overhaul, quarterly rebalance or simply keeping tabs on your performance on a day-to-day basis, Sharesight gives you all the tools you need to be a successful investor.

Track your multi-asset portfolio with Sharesight

If you’re not already using Sharesight, what are you waiting for? Join hundreds of thousands of global investors using Sharesight to track their multi-asset portfolios and make smarter investment decisions. Sign up and:

• Track all of your investments in one place, including global stocks, ETFs, mutual/managed funds, property and even cryptocurrency
• Automatically track your dividend and distribution income from stocks, ETFs and mutual/managed funds
• Run powerful reports built for investors, including performance, portfolio diversity, contribution analysis, future income, exposure, risk, multi-period and multi-currency valuation
• See the true picture of your investment performance, including the impact of brokerage fees, dividends, and capital gains with Sharesight’s annualised performance calculation methodology

Sign up for a FREE Sharesight account and get started tracking your investment performance (and tax) today.

FURTHER READING

• 7 reasons why Sharesight is better than a spreadsheet
• How Phil uses Sharesight as a roadmap for investing success
• Automatically track trades from over 200 global brokers