If you haven’t been keeping close track of it, your portfolio’s asset allocation may have shifted significantly over the past year. Your relative mix of assets like stocks, bonds, or real estate has a great impact on the volatility and expected future return of your portfolio.
Morningstar has a bunch of helpful tools for managing your investment portfolio, but many of them require a paid membership. However, one handy trick is that anyone can use many of these premium features for free at the T. Rowe Price website by signing up for a free account with nothing but an e-mail address.
Portfolio Manager
This tool lets you enter all your portfolio holdings, which it then stores for you and allows you to track it with automatically updated prices. You can either track all your future transactions as you go, or just input your updated holdings every few months like I do.
Portfolio X-Ray
Once you enter your holdings, simply look for the Portfolio X-Ray tab and you’ll have a complete breakdown of the true asset allocation of your overall portfolio. Does your “small cap” fund really own a bunch of mid-caps and large-cap funds? X-Ray will reveal your true exposure to stock style (i.e. Small/Mid/Large, Growth/Blend/Value), geographical regions (i.e. Japan, US) , stock sectors (i.e. Telecom, Energy), average expense ratio, and more.
If you’d rather have a quick peek without needing to register at all – but also without the ability to save your portfolio – try the Morningstar Instant X-Ray tool.
If you already have a target asset allocation in mind, now might be a good time to to rebalance your assets back towards that target. Rebalancing is a way to maintain the risk/reward balance that you have chosen for your investments, and also forces you to buy temporarily under-performing assets and sell over-performing assets (buy low, sell high). If you are looking for a bit more guidance, here are my favorite posts on investing.
The Best Credit Card Bonus Offers – November 2024
Big List of Free Stocks from Brokerage Apps
Best Interest Rates on Cash - November 2024
Free Credit Scores x 3 + Free Credit Monitoring
Best No Fee 0% APR Balance Transfer Offers
Little-Known Cellular Data Plans That Can Save Big Money
How To Haggle Your Cable or Direct TV Bill
Big List of Free Consumer Data Reports (Credit, Rent, Work)
Comments are now on again, no idea why it was off in the first place.
Hey Jonathan,
I really enjoyed the way you laid out the investing posts with a table of content and linked all the major pieces together with asset allocation, fund placement and so on.
Can you do a similar series on Insurance covering all the umbrella insurance, personal insurance, disability, renters or home owner’s insurance and so on. Will be really helpful for a lot of your readers.
Cheers!!
John
Nice info about the T-Rowe website tools being free! Now I just need a 1/2 to enter my portfolio. lol
If you go to the T. Rowe Price site and create an account (it’s free and you don’t need to buy any funds), you can get access to the more advanced Morningstar tools – like the other tabs of the “x-ray” that you normally need a premium account for.
Does this tool analyze most etfs? I use e*Trade, and for some reason its portfolio analyzer tool does not include all of my etfs like the VNQ, vanguard reit or IGE iShares Natural Resources, it just doesn’t recognize them.
yep, I just registered and they use the morningstar tool and these ETFs are “unclassified”, anyone know of a really good portfolio analysis tool?
Problem is, I’d like more diversity in my asset classes.. What about REITs for example? How about commodities? Micro-caps?
Alas, I’m stuck back with a spreadsheet and manually updating it…
@Maury – Nothing wrong with that, I love my spreadsheets 🙂 I’m trying to move most of them onto Google Docs.
I’m with the others: some ETFs and preferred stocks are not classified; also, I’m not sure how to recognize cash. Strange, too: on the Portfolio Tracker page it shows $0 market value for these entries, but in fact they are recognized correctly on the Stock Intersection page.
I’m going to keep playing with this. Understanding my asset allocation is a 2011 goal for me. I appreciate any tips others have on using the tools.
Thanks, Jonathan, for posting about this tool and all the other money saving products. I’m so glad I found your blog a couple of years ago!
Jonathan – Great post, thanks for the tips. This is something I’ve been struggling with recently as well. Too many retirement accounts to keep track of! I guess there could be worse problems to have…..
Jonathan,
I realize I’m commenting on an old post, so you may not see this, but have you ever looked at a product called Folio FN?
It appears to allow you to set up very customized asset allocations using ETFs from all providers and allows for one click rebalancing, etc. You can make deposits and with one click have those deposits spread out amongst your asset allocation. I’ve been wanting Schwab, Vanguard, E-trade, etc. to have this type of functionality, but it appears Folio FN is the only one that does right now.
From an article I just read:
Say, for instance, you invest $10,000 in a six-ETF folio, including 40% in an ETF tracking the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. If you want to invest an additional $1,000, one click will spread your dollars among the six ETFs according to your target allocations, including $400 to that S&P 500 fund.
But maybe U.S. stocks have risen more than other holdings recently, so that S&P fund has grown to be larger than 40% of your portfolio. You could, with a single click, request to have your new contribution distributed so that it nudges your portfolio back toward your allocation targets, which would mean putting less than 40% of the new dollars into the S&P 500 fund.
Folio Investing offers its own predesigned folios of ETFs and some created by outside providers. For instance, the firm’s retirement-focused Target Date folios of ETFs come in 24 varieties—offering target retirement dates at five-year intervals as well as three levels of risk (conservative, moderate and aggressive) for each target date. The 7Twelve Life Stage folios designed by Brigham Young University professor Craig Israelsen each use 12 funds to give exposure to a total of seven broad asset classes.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303348504575183953846781026.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines
Folio FN might be an interesting site for you to review. It seems to be the tool that us indexing asset allocation fans are looking for…