How do you add benchmarks for reports

[dhhill]

There are no benchmarks within existing portfolios that are being downloaded via Fund Manager (Advisor). How do I download or create benchmarks?

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi dhhill,

Benchmarks are just investments in Fund Manager. You create yourself a new investment for each benchmark you want to track. You may want to create yourself a new sub-portfolio for your benchmarks, and then put the new investments in there. Just right mouse click on the benchmark sub-portfolio, and choose "New Investment...". To help find what symbol to use for the benchmarks use your web browser and visit Yahoo, which is a good source for current and historical index prices. See:

http://finance.yahoo.com/indices

For example, the Dow is ^DJI. You would just record the shares as 0 when creating the investment, and you can enter anything for the price, as you can overwrite it by retrieving the prices from Yahoo.

Once you create your investments, you can retrieve historical and current quotes for them. Select them in the Portfolio Editor, and right mouse click and choose "Retrieve Selected Historical Prices". Assuming you're using the default historical quote server of "Yahoo (Historical)" you'll be prompted for a date range to download for these selected indices. You can do the same again but select "Retrieve Selected Prices" to just get the current pricing.

[Ivan]

Hi Mark,

Is there a way to get historical dividends for the indices, so we can compare our investments to the index with dividends?

Thanks,
Ivan

[Mark]

Hi Ivan,

You can sometimes find a version of an index that includes the dividends. For example, the S&P Total Return is the S&P with dividends included. On Yahoo it is ^PXTY and on Bloomberg the symbol for this is: SPXT:IND. Yahoo only seems to have current quotes on ^PXTY, but Bloomberg has historical prices for SPXT:IND. If you want to use Bloomberg you can either change your global default quote servers under "Options / Internet Settings..." or you can change it for just these indices under "Investment Properties... / Internet Retrieve".