An interview with Sharesight portfolio tracker

I chat to Dave Olsen from Sharesight about the portfolio tracking software and some exciting new functionality that is in the works.

Sharesight helps you with your money: They let you track holdings and your total investment portfolio all in one place to give you a complete picture of where your money is at. This is important because pretty much every brokerage tracking platform will not be recording dividends or other asset types such as Cryptocurrency.

Verdict: There is no better tool for portfolio tracking than Sharesight !
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The free sharesight tool is comprehensive, intuitive and has powerful reporting features that are easy to use. Sharesight’s service is reliable and the customer support team will quickly get back to you if you have any questions or issues. If you’re looking for an investing tool that can help simplify everything, this might be right for you – Sharesight monitors all the information you need to stay on top of your investments (and tax) and provides an unbiased view of your investment performance to help you make smart decisions with confidence – it is used by over 250,000 investors worldwide.

Check out my Full Captains Report on Sharesight here

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Sharesight content manager Dave Olsen

David has been a self confessed economics and finance nerd since high school and has been with Sharesight for almost 4 years. Before that he worked with companies including AppSense, Salesforce and Appliances Online.

Interview Questions

Question one: for those who have never used or heard about Sharesight, can you please give a brief description of exactly what Sharesight is and how it can help people on the path to FI?

Sharesight is an online portfolio tracker built to give self-directed investors the full picture of their investment performance, with automatic tracking of prices, dividends (including reinvestment), currency fluctuations and powerful tax reports.

For people on the path to financial independance, Sharesight takes the hard work out of portfolio maintenance and tracking your journey — plus it’s free for portfolios with 10 holdings or less.

Question two: where is Sharesight based? is Sharesight purely based in Australia or can it be used for investors world wide? 

Sharesight has offices in Wellington, New Zealand and Sydney, Australia, and is used by investors in 97 countries around the world. Sharesight has a number of core tax reports available for all users, but offer a number of additional reports built to local tax rules for the needs of investors in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. 

Question three: tracking your portfolio is important on the path to FI, and it can get tricky with things like dividend reinvestments and share splits. How does sharesight help track the true performance of a portfolio compared to your broker or share registry?

Brokers will only generally tell you the difference between your purchase price and today’s price, totally ignoring the impact of dividends (and reinvestments) on your investment performance.

Registries are a good record of the number of units you hold, but if your portfolio holds shares across multiple registries, you’ll still need to consolidate those figures in one place — that’s where Sharesight comes in.

Plus Sharesight takes much of the manual portfolio admin out of the equation (particularly if you use a broker Sharesight supports) so no fiddling with a complicated spreadsheet to calculate your performance.

Question four: is Sharesight purely for shares or if I owned property is there any scope for Sharesight to track property prices? Or is it just REITs for now?

Sharesight supports a range of instrument types on almost 30 exchanges worldwide, including shares, ETFs, LICs, REITs as well as Managed Funds/Mutual Funds in Australia, NZ and Canada. Not to mention almost 100 worldwide currencies, fixed interest and a number of cryptocurrencies.
We recently wrote a blog post detailing how to track investments in property (including tracking rental income) this can be done through Sharesight’s Custom Investment feature.

Question five I personally use ETFs as a way to invest in diversified and ultra low cost stock market index funds, as well as low cost index funds. Does Sharesight track all the individual holdings in these funds? How does Sharesight get the information?

Sharesight sources pricing information for ETFs directly from the ASX/NZX as well as international ETF data from our additional data providers. We also source ETF distribution component values for tax purposes directly from a number of share registries in Australia, including Computershare.

Question six: I’ve used Sharesight to prepare my tax documents for a few years now and it’s been super easy. The tax implications behind some ETF and LICs can be a bit complex, how does Sharesight process this behind the scenes? For Aussie investors, does sharesight link to the Australian Tax Office at all?

As I just mentioned, we work directly with the share registries in Australia to source ETF component data to help investors complete their tax returns and comply with the Attribution Managed Investment Trust tax reporting requirements for the ATO. We have no direct link to the ATO, but all our reports are built for Australian users to make completing their tax returns for the ATO as easy as possible.

Question seven: does Sharesight share or sell any of my investment data with anyone? Is my information secure?

Sharesight doesn’t sell or share any of your individual investment information. Though we do occasionally share updates using aggregate data such as our Sharesight20 trading snapshots of the top 20 trades across our users on the ASX and NZX exchanges.

Question eight: other than tracking your own holdings, what other ways can investors use Sharesight / what other tools does Sharesight offer investors?

We hear that many Sharesight users like to create a separate portfolio that they use as a watchlist of shares they are interested in buying, waiting for an opportunity to either buy on an up swing, or watching to strike when it becomes a value buy.

Question nine: can we expect to see automatic integration of Sharesight with brokers? So that trades are automatically migrated into your Sharesight portfolio after the trade is executed?

Sharesight already supports over 100 brokers through our emailed contract note functionality plus a number of brokers through API connections (including CMC Markets). We’d love to see more brokers integrate directly with the Sharesight API to make it easier for investors to connect their brokerage accounts to Sharesight.

Question ten : the fintech space is a rapidly emerging industry, what changes can we expect to see in sharesight as the company grows? Are there any new tools in the works?

We’re always working on new and exciting features, and have a number of improvements on our internal roadmap for 2020. We’ll have more details to announce on these when they’re ready.

Question eleven: do you personally invest in index fund ETFs or LICs? 

I personally like to keep things fairly simple with my investing, and generally stick to a few core index tracking ETFs, plus a couple of thematics to gain exposure to particular sectors.

Question 12: is there anything you’d like to chat about or point out which we haven’t covered which might be relevant to investors? 

Often the best way to see what Sharesight is all about is to just sign up and see it for action yourself. It’s free to sign up, so give it a try.