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My Mutual Fund Tracking Spreadsheet

Blogged By: Low Hang Wei @ February 11th, 2007 - 11:52 am

I started investing in Mutual Funds two months back and just came up with a simple spreadsheet to track my investments and here’s a screenshot:

Mutual Fund Planning Spreadsheet

I have hidden 3 columns of data: initial value, current value and number of units for my own privacy and so that you do not laugh at the puny amount of money I have. Anyway, the purpose for this spreadsheet is simple… it lets me know my annual returns percentages for each fund I bought and my portfolio as a whole. I think this is important, because while profits are good and losses are bad, I want to know exactly where I stand with my Mutual Funds Investment. I do not need to know the percentage returns of each fund, but rather I need to know the percentages as it relates to me. Hope I didn’t get you confused over here. :)

This spreadsheet takes only about 10 minutes to come up with and provides me with really useful information. Therefore I encourage anyone with investments to come up with something similar. In fact, I encourage the use of spreadsheets for tracking other stuff that you want to track. For example, when I used to run a website actively, I track my revenues and expenses in great detail with a spreadsheet. I also track advertising with a simple spreadsheet file and using these spreadsheets, I am able to tell which advertising is effective. With that, I conclude that the effectiveness of simple software tools should never be underestimated. :)

Blogged Under: Personal Finance

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2 Responses to “My Mutual Fund Tracking Spreadsheet”

  1. 1
    Michael Lo Says:
    February 27th, 2007 at 6:29 pm

    Congrats on your return.
    One thing that i am not so sure is that
    China unit trust seems to be a little overvalued.
    What is the rationale in getting that?
    Actually i am quite interested in finding out how unit trust works compared to local stock.

    Good luck to your million dollar challenge

    Hang Wei says:
    China’s stock market have gone up quite a bit, which gives an impression that it’s overvalued. However, I think the valuations are still pretty fair, unlike India which seems to be way overvalued. After I bought the China fund, there was some news that affected the China Stock market, but I’m holding onto it. I believe in its mid-term potential.

    The difference between stock market and unit trust is simple: Unit trust helps you to invest in many different instruments, commonly stocks or bonds. Therefore, the middleman eats away your profits, so generally speaking, investing directly in stocks will provide a higher yield. Mutual funds provide the advantage of diversification, so if you don’t have time to research stocks thoroughly, mutual funds are potentially good instruments.

  2. 2
    Lee Says:
    April 3rd, 2010 at 11:10 pm

    Hi,
    Thank you for the thoughts.A few questions, if you would…
    Where did you get the data for the last two columns?
    How of do you refigure the annual return and return to your portfolio?
    Is there a site that automatically puts the annual return in?
    I’m not good at formulas. Would you share the Excel formula for the return to your portfolio?
    Thank you for publishing your ss.

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