Best free asset allocation software

Quicken Premier offers investment tools to track and analyze a portfolio. Once an account is connected, Quicken tracks investment activity, including all transactions in the accounts. For example, Quicken will show you the Morningstar category of each investment, its rank in that category, the Morningstar rating and other Morningstar data.

In this, you get access to the data offered by Morningstar without having to manually enter your portfolio. You can review the asset allocation at the portfolio level, the account level or by individual security. The one downside to Quicken is its user interface. If you would prefer not to link investment accounts to an online tool or software app, Google Sheets offers an excellent way to track your investments. While a Google Sheets spreadsheet requires you to manual enter your portfolio data, Google Finance functions can automatically update the market price of each security.

The spreadsheet that I use is particularly well-suited when it comes to rebalancing a portfolio. As helpful as the tools listed above are, I find myself going back to this spreadsheet each time I need to make an adjustment to my asset allocation.

The sheet allows me to see the target allocation for each asset class, along with variance from target based on the market performance of my portfolio. He graduated from law school in and has written about personal finance and investing since Select Region. United States. United Kingdom. Rob Berger. Forbes Advisor Staff. Editorial Note: We earn a commission from partner links on Forbes Advisor. Commissions do not affect our editors' opinions or evaluations.

Focusing on its investment tools, Personal Capital provides the following high-level information: It classifies your investments between retirement and taxable accounts. It displays your investments by account or by individual holding. It tracks your investment performance over time, comparing your returns to several benchmarks.

It does so using the following investment categories: Cash International bonds US bonds. International stocks US stocks Alternatives. The incentive for optimal asset allocation in financial portfolios is returns that are larger than the returns available from all other portfolios with the same risk.

Asset Allocation is applicable to financial portfolios of all risk levels, asset classes, time horizons, liabilities, and institutional constraints. The Basics.

Portfolio Optimization. Overlay Optimization. That is a difficult question, as individual security selection requires study and analysis. If you enjoy researching and studying individual securities, then you need to devote time to learn this process. If seems to be a really misleading strategy suggestion to direct people into traditional IRAs and Ks without any warning about the future tax rates gotcha. You can probably get the gist by now and I just did not see any modeling software descriptions in your top-7 which seemed like they would help in this modeling any better than what one can do in EXCEL.

Please let me know if I am wrong. Hi Steve, You raise a really good and often neglected point. The reality of future tax rates could be a major problem for wealtlhier investors. Please keep me posted on this topic and whether you uncover an existing software that can handle future tax consequences modeling. Regards, Barbara. Do any of the above portfolio tools allow for hypothetical portfolios that include historical data?

If I want to construct a proposed portfolio for a client I too am a financial advisor and show them the historical performance, can this software accomplish this? I looked at a different package Qwanti in this past, but this was quite pricey. Any suggestions? Hi David, I like the portfolio visualizer. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I tried Portfoliovisualizer is it Great to try out. And very granular detailed it need it to be.

It helped me make my own portfolio back testing it that beat the SP about six times. But trying to find money to make use of my plan! Financial people knock backtesting but I am sure they use it too. And probably had supercomputers to do highlevel views of sentiment of the public, corp earning changes, political and world influences, job less rates etc. Thanks for writing in. Hi Barbara, this is a great and thorough analysis. I am looking for a very specific use case and hoping you know of a tool that could help.

In this example, we can use Microsoft as the stock. I have a portfolio of around 40 etfs. My ETFs have much crossover in holdings but vary enough to hold multiple. For example, how much Microsoft do I own or what percentage of my total etf portfolio reliant on Microsoft.

I also know that ETFs are occasionally rebalanced or adding and removing stocks. I would check out Morningstar xray. They may be able to tell you how much of an overlap you have in your holdings. Good luck, Barbara. Hi D, All financial accounts at major banks and financial companies have insurance to cover losses. PC has the same level of security.

If brokers offered a read-only OAuth login for systems like PC, it would make sense and then be secure. Is there a Canadian version of Personal Capital Software? Can you recommend a software platform that has been Canadianized I. Do any of these software tools let one do the following?

Or you might want to check out Zoonova dot com. Good luck. Hi Barbara, thank you very much for putting together this article. It was highly instructive.

As some other readers, I am mostly focused on investment portfolio management. However, after reading your article I have made a note to check out Personal Capital in more detail.

You mentioned sigfig which I also think is a nice tool. However, in this category, I believe the Ziggma Portfolio Manager really stands out. It has been built from a portfolio management perspective, contrary to almost all other platforms I know. To get started you simply link your bank account via Plaid so I think it is trustworthy, but in any case ziggma takes no confidential information other than the email address after which you get portfolio level analytics on risk, diversification and fundamentals on your investment portfolio.

I am not going to go into too much detail here, just wondered what your thoughts were and why they did not make the list. It is a very recent product so it may not even have been around at the time you wrote this article. The Ziggma Portfolio Manager is really helpful when it comes to monitoring and optimizing a portfolio. They still have a role to play in asset allocations, unpalatable a prospect though they seem.

As for the converse, the listed stocks in emerging markets are a funny bunch in each market and not necessarily representative of each national economy at all. Neverland — thanks very much for the links. It was actually the bond research you were referring to that I was asking about.

Re: overseas exposure and fidelity of local markets. I think this is something of a red herring. Yes, the capital markets are not faithful mimics of the economy. Vast numbers of private companies and activities are not represented on exchanges. And vice versa. Good luck unravelling all of that. No problem if I recognize and accept that risk but it ought to come with a health warning.

I agree there are very few hedged ETFs. I look at liquidity and avoid synthetics but still look for my base currency if it is available.

Read this for more:. Re: bonds. Bonds like any other asset class can go down in value as well as up. However, highly rated domestic government bonds are far less volatile than most: equities, gold, commodities, corporate bonds or emerging market bonds for example. If and when interest rates rise then you can expect bonds to fall in value initially. You can easily be hit by inflation that reduces the real value of your money over time and by interest rate risk i.

Cash tends to be very very very safe in the short term but over the long-term decades the risk of earning far less than from other asset classes is high.

Just some pointers for your own further research. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting. Next post: There are many ways to be an investor. Monevator is a place for my thoughts on money and investing. Please read my disclaimer. You can send me a message.