Sharesight stock portfolio tracker review

What is Sharesight?

Sharesight is a portfolio tracking tool that gives investors a complete picture of their portfolio's value and performance.

It is not an online brokerage account and you cannot execute trades via the platform. Instead, it works alongside your share trading platform once your trades have been executed to track their performance.

While most online brokers will give investors the value of their individual investments and their total current portfolio value, Sharesight includes elements like any dividends you've received and how capital gains tax has, or will, impact your overall returns.

As well as portfolio reporting, it offers comprehensive tax reporting and can be seamlessly integrated with your Xero account. As such, it can make life easier come tax time.

What are the key features of Sharesight?

More than 25 stock exchanges supported

You can import data for your investments placed on the Australian Securities Exchange as well as other leading global exchanges such as the NYSE, NASDAQ, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange.

Track listed and unlisted investments

You can track the performance of both listed assets as well as unlisted investments by importing your asset information.

The company has also partnered with several online and full-service brokers such as CMC Invest and Stake, which means that you can easily import and track any portfolios held with these partners through the Sharesight app.

Custom group bins

Organise your holdings into customisable groups based on your own preferences or use the set categories based on market, sector, asset class and country.

In-depth reporting

Access reporting that goes above and beyond just your current portfolio value. Sharesight offers reporting on taxable income, securities you've sold, capital gains tax (CGT) including unrealised CGT, future income and the diversity of your portfolio.

Dividend reporting

Get the full picture of what your portfolio is worth by seeing how your past dividends have affected your overall return. This includes any dividends that have been reinvested.

Price alerts

See daily price updates for your holdings and receive email price alerts when there's a significant change.

Xero integration

Seamlessly connect your Sharesight account to your Xero account to share your trading data and cash accounts, making it easier to manage your tax obligations.

Benchmarking

You can use the benchmarking tools to see how your performance is tracking against popular managed funds or entire markets.

Mobile app

You can access the Sharesight app via Google Play and the App Store, so you can keep up to date with your portfolio when you're out of the house.

What fees does Sharesight charge?

Investors with just 1 portfolio housing fewer than 10 holdings can access Sharesight for free. The free plan includes dividend reporting and share price alerts as well as access to the community forum for support. However, the free access portal has limited reporting tools compared to the plans with a monthly fee attached.

Here's a breakdown of the different paid plans available and what's included for each.

Is Sharesight worth paying for?

A product like Sharesight is designed to take the hassle out of share trading.

From a product point of view, it behaves largely as you would expect for a tracking service. It turns a manual process into an automated one.

Whether it's worth paying for isn't so much to do with the product but more to do with how complex your portfolio is and how much free time you have.

You can do a lot of what Sharesight offers yourself for free. Services including tracking share portfolio returns, tracking dates of when you bought and sold shares, dividend payments and tax implications for all of these payments can be done using Excel. And a quick search on YouTube will show you how to set everything up.

But there's a massive downside to DIYing your portfolio – it is time-consuming.

You will have to keep track of a lot of documentation, and the more you trade, the more information you need to keep on hand.

So whether this product is right for you really depends on your own situation. If you only have a couple of shares or ETFs and you are a long-term investor that isn't concerned about beating the market year in and year out, this might not be for you. But if you have a number of holdings, trade frequently or have a complex tax situation, something like this would greatly appeal to you.

How do I get started using Sharesight?

To get started with Sharesight, simply head to the site and create an account using your email address and then create a password.

If you have more than 10 holdings, you'll need to select one of the paid plans. The plan you choose will depend on the size of your portfolio and also the level of reporting you're after. If you've got an extensive portfolio, you can import your trading history to Sharesight using an Excel sheet. Alternatively, you can choose to manually add your individual holdings.