Sectors

[Mary Kennedy]

Here is a more humble suggestion for a future edition. I like being able to see how my money is distributed among your asset categories, but I'd ALSO like to be able to see how the money is distributed among sectors--energy, staples, etc. Right now, I'm confiscating your asset classifications and using them for this purpose, but as a result I can no longer get a quick sum of how much is in large cap vs small or international vs domestic. I have no preferences in re how you fit this into the geography of your dialogue boxes.

[Mark]

Hi Mary Kennedy,

Are you using the "Investment Goal" categories now? If not, you can use these. There are 2 general purpose category sets. They are labelled Asset Type and Investment Goal, but you can rename all the categories and use them for any purpose you want. Maybe you are already using this other category, and you're looking for a 3rd category set? This does get requested fairly often, so hopefully we can improve this in a future version.

[Mary Kennedy]

Yes, I use the investment goal for more goal-oriented purpose. I have created five categories that include income and total return and then three levels of risk for the main stock funds. I know it is a stretch to ask for three ways to sort my holdings, but that is what I'd like to be able to do. I thought about labeling things in two ways within a field. Like I could call something 50% large cap and 50% utilities, so that it would show up in both sorts but that isn't really quite what I want to do. Basically, I have sacrificed the large/small/international, etc categories for sector categories but am using these just for individual stocks and ETFs.

[Mark]

Hi Mary Kennedy,

I see... It sounds like you need more than the 2 sets of categories we provide. Maybe we can improve this in a future version. If you really want to break things down more, another possibility is for you to organize your holdings into sub-portfolios in a manner that allows you to see them broken down however you want. You can have as many sub-portfolios as you want, with as much hierarchy as you need. This isn't quite as convenient as the asset/goal categories, but it is an option.

[Mary Kennedy]

I probably can't do that because I already have a pretty complicated set of real portfolios--a 403b, two IRAs, and a Brokerage account. But here is something I have tried that almost works and you could make it work better: I figured out how to do a report that is filtered so it includes only stocks, where the sector issue is most salient, and then I do another with just bond funds that allows me to see how my income holdings are distributed among categories. I like that strategy quite a bit, bit I wish I could include some mutual funds in the "just stocks" report. I don't think I can use filters to include two categories of holdings in a single filter, but maybe that is something you could change.

[Mark]

Hi Mary Kennedy,

Okay, thanks for the idea/feedback. I agree a more flexible filter would be good.

[P.G]

Hi Mark,

Could I echo Marys' request. How about I give you want I'd like to do - like I say I'm a new user and perhaps there is a way of doing some of this already.

My asset allocation goals are to balance by portfolio:

1. Across geographies (ie essentially across the currency is asset is priced/distributes in)
2. Across asset classes (stocks, fixed income, other stuff)
3.Across markets (ie. EM, US, europe, asia/pac) which differs from (1) in that 3 is where they make their money rather than is domiciled)
4. Across industrial sectors.
5. Across whatever else I decide on a wet cold Friday afternoon (ok, can be flexible on that).

hope I'm not making myself too unpopular!
P.G

[Mary Kennedy]

Oh, this is a wonderful idea. I'd second all of these sorting strategies, and I'll do them on a sunny summer day.

BTW, one thing that occurred to me that might be a short-cut to this would be to skip the percentages and give us a "check all that apply" list. Then I could check a particular holding is large cap, international, energy sector, high beta, etc. Of course, if you do that, you'll have to gerry-rig the sorting charts so that I could check the categories I wanted to use for each sort. So if I want to look at my holdings by sector, I'd check all the sector categories and skip over the international categories, asset class categories and so forth.

I'm already confused trying to figure this out. I now see it is way easier to request than to figure out how to make it all work!

[Mark]

Hi P.G and Mary Kennedy,

Thanks for the feedback. Having more than 2 general purpose category sets does seem to be a popular request. Hopefully we can add this into a future update.