Portfolio Improvements

Critical work relating to portfolio transactions is now live. The aim was to enhance, correct, and optimize how portfolio and transaction data are handled.

This will impact your experience in three main ways:
[list=1][]Portfolios now use FIFO accounting (specifically realized transactions, holdings, and trading statistics). The open date and cost for realized transactions, the average cost for holdings, and all dependent values are computed accordingly. The impact of these changes on realized transactions also cascades to trading statistics. Note that these changes have not yet been integrated into the simulation engine.[]Historical transactions can now be added/edited/deleted without any transaction date constraint, and the re-computation following the modification of a portfolio’s transactions is now optimized and is expected to be fast in most circumstances.[*]Dividends which have not yet been paid are now shown with the dividend amount. Unless manually added, edited, or deleted, splits and dividends will automatically be kept in sync with Compustat data in a 60-day window. This means that dividends which are added to Compustat after the ex date will automatically be reconciled to your portfolio.[/list=1]

Sounds good.

You say that the changes are live but then mention that changes related to FIFO accounting have not yet been integrated into the simulation engine. Can you please clarify when these changes will be reflected in the simulation and reporting engines?

I was just looking at finally making a correction to my balance after fat fingering a trade back in Sept. Then i suddenly realized i could ACTUALLY change this without a work around. Thank you so much for this feature as someone who usually blows through my non automated trading and inputs wrong numbers. I rarely caught this within the previous time frame of 2 weeks. Thanks again!

Aaron,
There is still one problem. The declared dividends are not included in the Ending Market Value, as they were previously.
In the trading statistics, the dividends are ignored.

For the Best10(VDIGX)-Trader model below.
https://www.portfolio123.com/port_summary.jsp?portid=1260599

Look at the last 4 lines of the performance data and copy of trading statistics.
The Ending Market Value should be $195,126.82+543.46 = $195,670.28


Hi Aaron,
I went in a live portfolio to make some dividend adjustments/deletions and there is an error message that says “Error Invalid amount” (before I do anything). I am not able to make any deletions. Please advise.

[quote]
primus:
Sounds good.

You say that the changes are live but then mention that changes related to FIFO accounting have not yet been integrated into the simulation engine. Can you please clarify when these changes will be reflected in the simulation and reporting engines?
[/quote]Don’t expect FIFO support for simulations soon; other things take priority after this project with “all hands on deck”. The lack of support in simulations can be worked around until integration is in place:
Since the interface doesn’t show the Recompute Statistics button, you’ll need to manually navigate to [font=courier new]/performance_stats.jsp?portid=[color=red][/color]&RecalcStats=[/font] to trigger a recompute for your model. This will recompute statistics, holdings, and realized transactions for the model based on the transactions generated by the simulation.

[quote]
geov:
Aaron,
There is still one problem. The declared dividends are not included in the Ending Market Value, as they were previously.
In the trading statistics, the dividends are ignored.

For the Best10(VDIGX)-Trader model below.
https://www.portfolio123.com/port_summary.jsp?portid=1260599

Look at the last 4 lines of the performance data and copy of trading statistics.
The Ending Market Value should be $195,126.82+543.46 = $195,670.28
[/quote]I’ve just addressed the issue and updated the statistics for the portfolio you mentioned. Your other portfolios should reflect this change tomorrow. If you want to see it sooner, you can use the Recalculate Statistics button to force it to update immediately.

[quote]
brett:
Hi Aaron,
I went in a live portfolio to make some dividend adjustments/deletions and there is an error message that says “Error Invalid amount” (before I do anything). I am not able to make any deletions. Please advise.
[/quote]I’ll look into it. It’s probably something simple.

Brett,
It looks like some dividends still had a zero value. I corrected it for your portfolio and will address it for all remaining portfolios.

Hi Aaron,
now I get “ERROR: The COMMIT TRANSACTION request has no corresponding BEGIN TRANSACTION” when I try to delete a dividend.

Can you tell me which dividend you’re trying to delete?

Hi Aaron,
there are a few and I will explain below.(MYE,BKCC,TDS BPOP and others which I am still hunting down )

What I do is take the live portfolio trades on Monday and decide manually which ones I will execute and which ones I will not. Then on Tuesday I input all the trades manually and edit/delete others so that my live portfolio balances with my brokerage statements. I also manually adjust dividends due to withholding taxes.
All went well until this change was made and my cash balance was way off(I am not complaining as once the bugs are worked out I do think this is better). What I am speculating (?)has happened is that the code is somehow reading trades that were previously deleted and attaching dividends to them if they were there on the EX-Div date.( I have noticed that there are dividends where I did not actually own the stock)
All this to say that I am unable to the delete the dividends I want.

I’m a bit confused about the implications of this. Does this mean that the realized transactions in a portfolio will include the dividends paid? Which is a pet dream of mine. I’ve always wondered why dividends were included only in “all transactions” and not in “realized transactions,” and including dividends in the latter would be fantastic to get the full picture of returns on each transaction.

P123,

I will never state enough how immensely I appreciate what you guys are doing and the constant improvements you are bringing to the platform.

Can I however please request that before changing any of your live webpages, you publish a heads-up on the forum a few days before (or better yet via email: I remember receiving one for the last major change several months ago).

Reason: as there is currently no API, a few of us rely on “scraping” parts of the website to automate “back-office” work such as -in this case- realigning portfolios / transactions between IB and live ports.

Currently, it is always with a bit of apprehension that I do my weekly re-balance or weekly post-transaction adjustments…
It would be good to know ahead of time if I should put time aside for some programming in a given week.

Thank you in advance,

Jerome

We’re not quite there yet, Yuval. It’s an interesting idea and would be as involved as it is to track positions in FIFO P&L. I don’t think it would be too difficult to augment the implementation to also track this though. This should probably be a feature suggestion.

It was a feature suggestion, actually. See https://www.portfolio123.com/feature_request.jsp?view=my&cat=-1&featureReqID=1422 - YT