Create "virtual" sub-portfolios

[henrikk]

I do not know what to call this - 'virtual' is almost certainly the wrong term. Here is what I want to do. I have a brokerage account with $N which consists of (internally for my family) of 3 sub account where X+Y+Z = N. I do not have (or want) three different brokerage accounts, but I need to keep track of X, Y & Z separately. There three sub-portfolios might invest in the same underlying securities (which means the brokerage account lumps them all together) making it difficult to track three different sub-portfolios separately.

So one way to do this is keeping a secondary log (excel spread sheet or the like). Is there a better way? Can FundManager track sub-portfolios that only exists from accounting perspective (for lack of a better way of putting it).

I know other people have this problem --- keeping track of different "pots" of money within a larger account. How do you do this? What software helps you do this?

- Henrik

[Mark]

Hi Henrik,

You could just create the 3 sub-portfolios, and move the appropriate investments into each sub, depending on who owns what. If a particular security is owned by more than 1 sub-portfolio you'd have to break the investment into 2 (or 3). You could use "File / File Operations / New Investment from Existing..." to help you do this, and then delete the appropriate number of shares from each investment, so you end up with the total correct number of shares in the top level sub-portfolio.

There is no real easy way to do this, since you don't have an account for each X, Y, and Z.

If you happen to have a situation where X, Y, and Z own percentages of each investment, you could also utilize categories. For example, you can rename 3 of the 100 available "Investment Goals" for X, Y, and Z, and then assign each investment in sub-portfolio N to the appropriate percentages of X, Y, and Z. These percentages can be different for each investment in the account.