Keeping track of your finances is overwhelming these days. The selection of an appropriate software package can have a significant impact on the overall success of a small investor. Imagine having your stocks, bonds, mutual funds and other investments and calculating the gains (or losses) over any time frame with the push of a button. Manage your portfolio and 401k, pay your bills and bank online, trade bonds, mutual funds and stocks, receive tax articles and real-time stock reports.

Personal Investment Software has three general categories:

  1. Tracking involves the process of following and charting investments over time
  2. Trading consists of creating a optimal portfolios
  3. Selection or Screening involves investments according to certain criteria

Most personal investment software focus on either tracking and trading or tracking and screening.

Evaluating Personal Investment Software:

  1. Ability to interpret specific trends and indicators.
  2. User manual/tutorial (hardcopy, troubleshooting index and examples, easy to understand)
  3. Ability to customize -user interface, modify screens, charts and reports
  4. Charting Capabilities-varieties of graphs and tables for data analysis and presentation
  5. Data input- how easy is it to transfer data
  6. Ease of Use/Installation
  7. Intuitive navigation, user-friendly features
  8. Banking/Bills-online banking features, electronic payments, account transactions, account reconciliation
  9. Financial Planning-plan your retirement, purchases, taxes, home purchases, debt relief and other financial goals and money management concerns and provides
  10. Financial calculators- estimate costs, expenses, savings, taxes
  11. Tax Options- export financial information into tax software estimate your tax with holdings and capital gains.
  12. Reporting- of your finances- cash flow, budgets, expenditures
  13. Initial cost as well as the recurring online charges of software
  14. Demonstration disk or program
  15. Retrieve Transactions Directly from your Broker or Fund Company
  16. Yield Calculations- to report how well your money performed, or how well the underlying investment performed.

Reviews

Quicken Premier 2010:
costs about $90, tracks your financial portfolio and may also offer some investing tips. In some versions Quicken shows you ways to not only pick investments best suited for your financial goals, but also methods to minimize taxes on those investments.

Fund Manager:
expensive, available in three versions personal, professional, and advisor, can import files from Quicken and Microsoft Money. Personal version includes tracking trailing stop loss alerts and ability to export to tax software programs. Fund Manager is free for 60 days is free for 60 days and then $69 after that for a personal license.

Stator:
Costs $50 to $460
three versions; lite, standard, or professional versions; Lite version includes tracking of unlimited bank accounts, one investment portfolio, and online price updates. The program also includes a trader’s diary-keeping feature.

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