Thursday, February 24, 2011

Managing Portfolio with Google Documents

Last week I had a very unpleasant surprise. I use Yahoo! Finance quite extensively for portfolio management. One of portfolios is set up as a shopping list, with low and high limits set. Very useful feature, you can see at a glance which stocks are trading outside of set limits.
Last week, Yahoo! completely changed portfolios layout. Among other changes, the ability to set and see limits was completely gone. I was outraged, a lot of my work just disappeared. I submitted complaint to Yahoo! and probably was not alone, because couple days later old portfolios layout was returned, and all my limits with it. But this made me think: what if by some whim of somebody such thing happens again?
Here comes Google Documents. There is a whole lot of possibilities for investment management there, and I am just scratching the surface.
Here's the link to the simple portfolio spreadsheet. Columns "Ticker", "Low Limit", "High Limit" and "Notes" are entered by user. Column "Price" is a function based column. Function "gettickerprice" reads current stock price from Google Finance. Price quote is delayed, as per Google Finance rules. Another feature of this spreadsheet: tickers are painted red if price is below low limit and green if price is above high limit. This work is done by script "colortickers", which is also a part of this spreadsheet.
This spreadsheet is public read only. You can (probably) copy it into your own Google account and modify as you wish.
I'm still working on synchronization of Yahoo! Finance shopping list portfolio with this spreadsheet. Not sure it's possible, but we'll see.

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