Sharesight Review – A Look At This Portfolio Tracking Platform

About Sharesight

Sharesight is a professional-quality portfolio tracking platform. It offers a few helpful features like dividend forecasting and diversification analysis. However, it’s hard to say that Sharesight is worth the rather high cost when there are so many free or cheap portfolio management tools on the market.

Sharesight Pricing Options

Sharesight is surprisingly expensive for a portfolio tracking tool. You can use the platform for free, but only for up to 10 holdings. A Starter plan enables you to track 20 holdings for $15 per month, which seems rather steep. At that price, you also do not get access to dividend or contribution analysis reports.

The Investor plan, for $24 per month, is what most Sharesight users need, as it lets you track an unlimited number of holdings across 3 portfolios. This plan also unlocks all of Sharesight’s reporting features except for contribution analysis. For that, you’ll need an Expert plan for $31 per month.

You can try out any of Sharesight’s paid plans for seven days before committing. In addition, if you sign up for a full year, you get a 25% pricing discount.

Sharesight Features

Transaction Tracking

Sharesight is similar to other portfolio trackers in how it handles transactions. You can link a variety of compatible brokers and the service will import your trade history, or you can upload a CSV file of trades if your broker is incompatible. In addition, Sharesight lets you enter trades into the platform manually.

One of the neat things that Sharesight also offers is email tracking. If your broker is incompatible with the platform but sends you trade confirmation emails, Sharesight can use those emails to automatically import trades. Of course, this does require trusting Sharesight with access to your email.

Basic Reports

There are several basic reports available in Sharesight. Free and Starter plan users get access to reports on taxable income, overall performance, and historical transactions. The only notable feature among these is that you can sort your performance report by market sector and exclude open positions. Otherwise, these reports are essentially identical to what the majority of brokers offer natively.

Advanced Reports

Advanced reports in Sharesight include analysis of your dividend income, portfolio diversity, and contributions. (Contribution analysis is only available with the Expert plan.)

The dividend income report is fairly simple, as it just lists all dividends expected to be paid out in the future based on your current portfolio holdings. Notably, it doesn’t take into account companies’ historical dividend growth when making projections. 

The portfolio diversity report, too, is straightforward. Essentially, you get a pie chart and a table showing how your portfolio is divided among asset classes or market sectors. You can’t slice the data over multiple levels – for example, by asset class and market sector for stocks – at the same time. Sharesight also doesn’t offer correlation analysis, which is available in some other portfolio management platforms. Overall, this report feels pretty standard.

The contribution analysis report is strangely similar to the basic performance report. You can see how your investments across asset classes or market sectors have performed over time. The main difference is that the contribution analysis displays how a particular class of investments has impacted your portfolio overall, as opposed to showing the performance for a single position. Still, this data could easily be backed out using Excel, and it hardly seems worth paying extra for.

Customization And Layout

Sharesight allows you to export data from any reports to Excel or to a PDF. In addition, you can easily share these exports by email right from the platform.

Beyond that, though, there isn’t much you can do to customize Sharesight. You don’t have any control over plot axes or types, although the defaults do a nice job in most cases. Having the option to include or exclude open positions for most reports is a helpful analysis feature.

Compatible Brokerages

Sharesight is compatible with about 25 international brokers. However, it’s notable that the platform is missing some major names in US trading. For example, it doesn’t support Schwab, E*TRADE, or TD Ameritrade.

Sharesight Platform Differentiators

Sharesight is a well-built portfolio analysis and tracking platform. However, there are so many of these tools on the market, like JStock and Stock Tracker App. Sharesight simply doesn’t do all that much to stand out. The ability to exclude open positions from reports is a slight, but significant difference from the reporting tools that many brokers offer. At the same time, though, the advanced reports for dividend income and portfolio diversification are hardly unique and aren’t particularly actionable.

All in all, Sharesight would be a good platform if it didn’t cost much more than comparable tools. But it’s hard to justify the premium pricing based on the available features. 

What Type Of Trader Is Sharesight Best For?

Sharesight works for both day traders and long-term investors, although day traders will want to ensure that Sharesight will automatically import transactions from their brokers. The ability to track an unlimited number of holdings is helpful, although many investors may want to separate holdings into more than just one or three portfolios. At the end of the day, Sharesight will be most useful for investors whose brokers don’t offer integrated portfolio management tools and need a unified platform to stand in. 

Pros

• Compatible with 25+ brokers
• Email tracking to import trades
• Exclude open positions from reports
• Supports data export to Excel or PDF
• Works for multiple asset classes

Cons

• Not compatible with major US brokers
• Expensive for tools that are free elsewhere
• Leaves out advanced analyses like correlation