Recording system for trades and holdings

[tobo]

Hey, drillfix, thanks - I am gonna try trade trakker - it is US$34.95 one time payment only, which is fine, but only if it handles multi currency adequately. Quick glance suggests it just keeps them separate with no conversion (which would be useless. I need to record exchange rate on the day purchased and express total in NZD equiv. This is necessary for tax too.)

Mark and Steve, for size of my portfolio, I would not want to pay $39/month for the rest of my life, perhaps about $10,000-$20,000 (in today's dollars). You can buy a pretty sohisticated accounting package for that sort of money.
Haven't actually broken even yet from 2007 first year investing, so no wasteful spending yet. (I eat sandwiches for lunch, not up to the scale of restaurant lunches with valet parking for the Lambo. Day job still pays for that sandwich.)

[tobo]

Mark,
I looked at Stator, but the A$55 Lite version doesn't do multi currency, you need the Professional (A$500) version for that.

Cheers,
ToBo

[CJ]

I have used MSMoney to do this though apparently MSMoney is going to the deadpool (no longer sold or supported by microsoft). It works multicurrency.

Maybe look at quickens product?

Has anyone looked at Xero for share traders? Though I suppose the money fee may be a bit to high as well.

By the way, 50-100 trades a year sounds close to trading rather than investing. Unless this is mainly buy, not selling, you may want to check this.

[Ricardo]

tobo
I know you are after cheap or free. Always my preference too, but in the end I bought Stator Pro, which is a first class product with excellent support. Handles multi currency brilliantly.
Yes, Microsoft is dropping Money, but they haven't touched the version on sale in NZ for quite some time now anyway. You might pick one up on Trademe. Handling of multi currency is not perfect, which is why I bought Stator.
I have the latest version of Quicken Personal Plus and am dubious if it will be good enough to help me much at all. I bought it as it is advertised as downloading directly from Etrade Australia (have an account there). Well, it does, but only if you install it as the Australian version, which complicates things for your NZ accounts. You set the currency of an account when you first add it. I am not wasting time on it anymore, but it does not look as if I can import historical exchange rates to tie in with my transactions. They do offer a trial.
From my experience, stick with Excel until your trading justifies Stator. You should be able to pull most of your data in from Excel when (if) you do.
cheers

[ratkin]

fundmanager is reasonable , they have a free trial and it cheap enough to buy .

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/index.html