Whether you’re a retail, institutional, active or passive Investor, are you prepared for the financial year ahead? You may also find yourself making uninformed and rash decisions that don’t fit your investing strategy and won’t help you perform in the long run.
If you’re looking for some simple ways to improve your performance and strengthen your portfolio against market volatility, here are four ways Allymon can help you become a more prepared investor.
1. Evaluate Your Investor Strategy
Whether it’s the beginning of the year and you’re looking to do an annual refresh of your strategy, or maybe you’re mid-way through the year and would like to rebalance your portfolio due to changes in market conditions. Whatever the case, it’s important first to get a picture of your portfolio’s asset allocation and diversification.
To determine your asset allocation, you can get a report, which shows how your portfolio is diversified across different investment types, markets, countries, industries and sectors. You also have the option to use your custom groups that reflect your specific investment strategy or asset allocation target.
Once you have determined your asset allocation, you can get an analysis report to see how your asset classes are performing relative to each other. This can be done over a specific period of their choice and is a good way to evaluate the success of your investment strategy and see whether you need to rebalance your portfolio.
If you’ve chosen to be an ETF investor, you can utilize another useful portfolio rebalancing tool. The report displays your portfolio’s exposure to different industries, investment types and sectors by listing your direct stock holdings alongside any stocks held within exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This also identifies any overlap in your portfolio, making it easier to diversify your portfolio by shedding any redundant stocks or ETFs.
2. Track your portfolio against an Index
Once you have evaluated your investment strategy and rebalanced your portfolio if necessary, it’s a good time to start tracking your portfolio against a benchmark. For example, by benchmarking your portfolio against an index-tracking ETF, you can track your portfolio against market trends. This allows you to determine whether your portfolio’s performance can be attributed to market conditions or your own investment decisions.
Investors can benchmark their portfolio against any one of the 500,000+ stocks, ETFs, funds and unit trusts they support. They can add a benchmark on your portfolio’s Overview page and select the instrument that best reflects your asset allocation or investing strategy in conjunction with your KYC information. This makes it easy to see where your portfolio diverges from the benchmark. In this case, you may decide to alter your investing strategy or even invest your money in the benchmark ETF rather than continuing to pick stocks.
3. Review and Evaluate your Investor Dividends
You may have chosen to invest in dividend-paying stocks, but know that it’s important to have a way to keep track of all your dividend and distribution statements. You could keep track of them in a spreadsheet, but the ability to track them automatically makes it much easier to be a prepared investor, especially when tax time rolls around.
At Allymon, dividends and distributions are automatically tracked in your portfolio, including dividend reinvestment plans. Once you’ve added all your holdings to your Allymon account and set up any DRPs you may have, all you need to do is log in to Allymon and verify and accept your dividend and distribution payments as they come in.
Another useful feature for dividend investors, Allymon’s income report allows investors to see all of their upcoming announced dividends. This makes it easy for dividend investors to track their monthly dividend income and project their short-term cash flow.
The future income report is designed to help you keep track of upcoming dividends. Still, you can also run it over past periods to give you a consolidated record of all the dividends you have received.
4. Be Prepared Prior to Filing Your Taxes
For many investors, getting ready for tax time can be somewhat of a nightmare, requiring you to track down a mixture of paper and digital statements, often from more than one share registry. It’s just as inconvenient for accountants as it is for investors, with all the back-and-forth communications about the various statements and receipts required to file a tax return.
Investors can save time (and potentially money) by keeping track of all their records at Allymon throughout the year. Trades and dividends are automatically tracked in your Allymon account, but investors also have the option to attach files such as trade confirmations and dividend statements to the holdings in their portfolio. This makes verifying these records at tax time much easier before sharing the information with an accountant.
Allymon also has a range of convenient reports designed to help investors prepare for tax time:
- Taxable income report: See all dividend, distribution and interest payments received during any selected period.
- Capital gains tax report: Calculate capital gains from a CGT perspective over any selected period.
- Unrealized capital gains tax report: unrealized unrealized capital gains at any date to model tax loss selling scenarios and unrealized CGT liability.
Contact us and see how we can assist you in achieving your financial goals today.
