Introduction

You should always track their investments. Your investments are always prone to change. Stock prices keep changing. Interest rates of bank fixed deposits change. Rates of return of bonds and mutual funds also fluctuate.  Tracking your investments regularly can solve a lot of your financial queries and help you in your future financial planning. You must categorise your investments to track their performance properly.

Building Your Investment Portfolio

This is the first step in tracking your investments. The following steps can help you in building your investment portfolio.

Determine the suitable asset allocation for you

You need to assess your financial situation and make your financial objectives clear. You then need to make the investment strategy that suits your financial needs. You must also determine your risk appetite.

Distribute your capital

The next step is to distribute your capital among different asset classes. You can create a Demat account for your online investments. You can also choose an online brokerage for the allocation of capital. You can divide these asset classes further into subclasses.

Analyse and rebalance

You need to constantly evaluate your investments and rebalance them regularly. You need to quantitatively categorise your investments to properly analyse your portfolio investments. You can readjust your portfolio according to your financial needs periodically.

Performance Metrics To Track Your Investments

While evaluating your investment portfolio, you need to make sure that you meet your financial goals, that your investments are crossing industry benchmarks, and that they do not pose an excessive risk to your finances. Investors often make mistakes in making investment decisions depending on their portfolio performance, as they employ incomplete or wrong criteria for the performance assessment. While looking at your portfolio’s performance, you must consider some non-negotiable performance criteria. Let us have a look!

Performance against investment goals

Stacking up your investment against your investment goals is the most effective way to judge their performance.  What made you invest in the assets in your portfolio in the first place? Were you looking to create wealth? Were you expecting periodic returns? Were you looking to build wealth for family occasions such as education and marriage? Did you start building the corpus for an unforeseen medical emergency? Or the reason is the combination of all the above reasons? Analyse your portfolio’s returns and check if it is still on the path to meeting your financial objectives. You may need to make important decisions based on this analysis.

Performance against their stated investment objectives

Even when your investments meet your investment goals, there is a possibility that they are underperforming against the investment’s stated goals. For instance, consider that you have invested in a mutual fund with its stated goals of “secure investor wealth in the long term”. But, if the fund depreciates in the long term compared to the cost that you incurred, it has underperformed compared to its stated investment objective. Even if it meets your investment goals that can be different from the fund’s stated goal, the fund has underperformed in this case.

Performance against industry standards or benchmarks

After you assess your investment against the above two criteria, it is time to evaluate it against its respective industry’s standards, benchmarks, and top performers. Bonds carry ratings from rating agencies that point towards their health and default risk. Most funds come with a corresponding stock index against which you can benchmark these funds. You can benchmark your investments in gold against global prices, along with national exchange prices. You can evaluate your real estate investments by studying the ratings of your builder and other projects from rating agencies.

Performance in bear markets

Looking at how your portfolio performs during bearish or recessionary phases of the economy, you can evaluate its performance effectively.  Most asset classes perform well in bull markets, following the positive trends of the larger economy.

As a basic rule, you must avoid any asset or investment class that amplifies the larger economy’s downswings disproportionately and causes steep losses to the investor. Simply put, you should avoid highly volatile asset classes.

Ways to Evaluate and Consolidate Your Investments

Performance evaluation

You can get help from various financial dashboards, which can give you a graphical interface to monitor and track your funds. They also assist you in predicting important patterns. These dashboards save your time and effort.

Fees evaluation

It is important to track investment fees, especially if your portfolio has expensive investments. Such investments can reduce your portfolio’s valuation significantly. Hence, it is advisable to actively monitor your investment fees’ behaviour.

Monitoring asset allocation

You may have to invest in many assets simultaneously. In such a scenario, monitoring each of your assets can become complex. Asset allocation monitoring can ensure that your investment strategies are in sync with the market risks. Different assets’ performance can influence your portfolio differently. Hence, you must track all of your assets.

Keeping Track Of Your Investments Online

You can find different investment management apps and software. But, you should be careful about malware that can misuse the data you feed into such apps. Do ample research to find such companies’ origins and know about the licences they hold. The following are some apps, websites, and software you can use to track your investments.

ET Money

ET Money is a spending and investment tracker. On ET Money, you can monitor your investments in stocks, mutual funds, NPS schemes, and fixed deposits. Through ET Money, you can invest direct mutual funds at zero commission. By choosing these funds, you can save on the commission that you usually pay your agent, such as a bank. You can track your previous investments in one place by uploading their statement.

Moneycontrol

It is a financial portal. Network18 owns it. Moneycontrol’s portfolio manager enables you to monitor your investments in mutual funds, stocks, silver, gold, platinum, Unit-Linked Insurance Plans, and real estate. You can also track your loans with the help of this portal. You can access Moneycontrol’s app in English, Gujarati, and Hindi.

INDmoney

The investment tracker of INDmoney enables you to track your investments in ETFs, stocks, mutual funds, EPF, PPF, NPS, bonds, and real estate. The platform connects to your e-mail account and extracts data linked to your PAN number. You can also upload your CDSL/NSDL statements to upload your stock portfolio. The platform helps you in your tax planning. You can also plan your investments with the help of the platform’s investment calculators to select the most suitable investment solution.

TickerTape

Using TickerTape, you can track the performance of your stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds. You can log in using your account with different brokerages. These brokerages include Groww, Zerodha, ICICIdirect, Motilal Oswal, AxisDirect, and many others. The platform also offers screeners for ETFs, mutual funds, and stocks.

Kuvera

With the help of Kuvera, you can track mutual funds, stocks, and fixed deposits. You can also invest in US-based stocks. You can establish an investment goal and track your investments as a part of this goal.

Portfolio Tracker – Wealthy

You can use Wealthy’s portfolio tracker to monitor your investments in mutual funds. You can also have an experienced financial advisor review your portfolio. You can sync your investment data by connecting your e-mail. Wealthy also offers investment portfolios focused on diversification and tax-saving.

Using Spreadsheets to Track Investments

Spreadsheets are a customizable tool to track your portfolio. But, you need to research and input the data yourself. You can create intuitive graphs that are suitable to your queries if you can collect and maintain data.

P2P Lending

One of the rapidly growing, technology-enabled investment opportunities is P2P lending. In the Fractional Matchmaking Peer-to-Peer Plan (FMPP) FMPP investors have earned upto 12% p.a. since launch. You can track your returns using LenDenClub’s interactive dashboard.

Conclusion

The market keeps changing, owing to many factors, influencing your investments. Your returns on even safe investment opportunities, such as fixed deposits, can change depending on the macroeconomic environment. Hence, it is always advisable to keep tracking your investments to know how they are faring. This helps you in making necessary changes in your investment portfolio so that you are on track to reach your investment objectives.