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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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One Response 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.

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