Canadian Portfolio Setup Questions

[Ron AKA]

I am about to setup my Canadian investments in Fund Manager. I would be interested in any comments on what I plan to do, and alternatives you might suggest so I don't back myself into a corner down the road.

1. Holdings Import - Although OFX is an option, it really does not import much and requires significant data manipulation. I plan to just manually enter transactions to get started. Transaction import is limited to CSV files and again are too limited in my view to be useful.

2. Starting Point - Some of my ETF investments are quite recent, and I plan to go back to the initial purchase date and make the starting entry. I will then enter any subsequent buy/sell and dividend transactions. However, other ETF's and mutual funds have been in my portfolio for 10+ years and I am not interested in going back to day 1. My thought is to look at the current per share Cost price, and go back to a time when that price was the market price. I will make that my initial investment, and skip all the subsequent transactions. Yes, I know I will lose the detail, but my current book value should be correct, and historical performance should be about right. Thoughts?

3. Historical and quote price updates - After looking at a few options it seems Google may be the best one to get both. It seems you have to prefix the stocks and ETFs with TSE: and mutual funds with MUTF_CA, and you get $CDN prices back. I'm assuming I have to use the full symbols with the prefixes in Fund Manager.

4. Allocation Targets and Rebalancing - Am planning to use custom settings of Canada, US, and International in the Asset Type field, as well as High Growth, Growth, Dividend, and Fixed Income in the Investment Goal field. Sector would be left unused for future use.

5. Cash Accounts - I seem to be a bit confused about the terminology used here. My broker simply lists the stock, ETF, and Mutual fund holdings within an account. Cash is just listed as Cash within each account. Does that mean I should create a Cash "Investment" within each sub-Portfolio?

6. Investment File name - I have the same mutual fund or ETF in as many as 6 different sub-Portfolios. Should they all have the same name? It seems that Fund Manager combines Portfolio holdings and fund data into the same table of data. I find it confusing.

Thanks for any help and/or suggestions you can make. This is not turning out as simple as I thought it might be.

[Mark]

Hi Ron AKA,

1) The OFX file format supports both transactions and positions. Whether either is populated depends on the source that generates the OFX file.

2) Yes, you can do this. You don't have to buy at market price, so you can pick any date you want to go back to. Transaction prices are independent of market prices.

3) Yes, just enter the symbol in Fund Manager as you see on the quote server you choose to use.

4) This is perfectly fine.

5) Yes. Typically each account would have a cash investment, designated as your default cash account. See our tutorial on tracking cash.

6) No, they would each have a unique filename, so you can track their transactions separately. See this FAQ.

[Ron AKA]

OK, thanks Mark. I think I have it...