Icarra.com portfolio tracking

Thanks to the first commenter on my blog, I was referred to icarra.com, a free portfolio tracking site. It's my first hour using it, but here's my Scottrade IRA account. I'm a Motley Fool subscriber, so pretty much my whole IRA contains picks from them. But back to Icarra.



Icarra gives me a portfolio breakdown by sector, so I can see where I might be overweight. I share my portfolio by NAV, which means now my whole IRA looks like a single Mutual Fund for the public to track as well. I don't know the mathematics behind NAV calculation, but Icarra makes it easy.

I imported my Scottrade transactions via .qif (Quicken). However it's a beta feature for Icarra currently, so all my Sell transactions had double-negatives, which treated them as positive cash and positive share additions. So I had to remove all the '-' symbols in the Sell transactions that were imported.

Icarra doesn't understand my Call/Put options, but that's small $ so I didn't worry about too much. Overall, the web site is a bit plain, but gives me a good tracking method for my portfolio. I might start using this over Cake in order to watch my taxable investment accounts as well, and comparing them with the S&P 500.

Apparently, Icarra also doesn't show the current day's performance until later in the night? The markets are closed after a huge rally today (4/1/2008), but I can't get it to show me performance statistics past 3/31/2008.

Don't time the market with your retirement

At the end of December 2007, I completed the paperwork to roll over my former employer's 401k into a Scottrade IRA. The transfer completed in the first week of January and I started gradually buying up stock. The markets tanked in January, and my portfolio simply kept bleeding away as I continued to catch the falling knives.

A friend decided to move a chunk of his 401k into a cash fund, because he didn't want to lose money. In doing this, I felt he was trying to time the market. I referred him to various articles explaining the reasoning of staying in the market versus cash. But it was already done, and there was a 60-day waiting period before he could move the cash back into a mutual fund.

While I consider myself a long-term-buy-and-hold investor, I've also been fairly risky with my investments. I know I have a 30+ year time horizon for my retirement portfolio to grow, so I'm pretty heavily overweight on growth stocks and am prepared to ride the roller-coaster of volatility. My friend on the other hand probably had less tolerance for market volatility. His answer to me was "Nobody ever complained about not losing money."

So while my stocks jittered and juked up and down in January and February, my friend maintained a stabler portfolio. In the beginning of March I reminded him that his 60-day waiting period is probably over, and that he should be moving his cash back in. He missed the big rally that started on March 18. My IRA clawed its way out of -10% all the way up to +8% today, all in the span of 5 trading days.

His remark strikes me still, because while surely he didn't lose money, he lost the opportunity to make money. This is where risk aversion can have a detrimental effect on retirement returns. For my time horizon of 30+ years I am eager to see how my growth weighted stocks will perform. Hopefully, they're not all subprime, right?

Zecco review March 2008

Zecco.com is having sporadic issues today. I intermittently get Service Unavailable errors. I did put in a couple orders, which you can follow on my Cake Financial portfolio.

I recently rolled over my Scottrade account to Zecco. My Sharebuilder account is in progress, as I didn't have the required $50 in cash to process the account transfer fee. Scottrade didn't charge me anything to transfer to Zecco. It's a little dumb, since Sharebuilder sells off all partial shares before transferring, and now my cash balance is almost $200, which would have covered the account transfer fee.

The main reason I was drawn to Zecco is of course the $0 commissions for up to 10 stock trades a month. After that, it's $4.50/trade which is still a damn good deal. However, their website has a lot to be desired. Their ACH checking account transfer page is lame -- doesn't match their site aesthetics at all. This probably has to do with their interface to Penson Financial -- the securities firm behind Zecco.

In this volatile market, Zecco allows me to buy "nibble" positions -- small trades at $100 or $200 at a time, without having to worry about the commission cost, which would definitely add up over time.

For an ACH transfer from my checking account, $5,000 got posted to Zecco within 2 business days. For an ACH transfer of $10,000 and above however, I have to wait 5-7 business days.

Zecco does allow dividend reinvestment, but you must submit the request in writing to their customer service explicitly stating which ticket symbol you wish to reinvest. Zecco does not do partial shares, so you'll have a cash remainder after.

For each trade I've made, however, Penson Financial sends me paper mail of the transaction. I'm not sure how to turn that off. I'll be contacting customer service. Customer service normally takes around 2 days to respond to e-mail. When I called them, the wait time was around 10 minutes.

For the stocks that transferred from Scottrade, Zecco shows them as having a $0 basis, which of course is wrong. I didn't really expect that to transfer, but somehow Cake Financial downloaded the transactions from Zecco and still maintained the original basis. Neat.

I still use my Scottrade account for the Realtime ticker applet, as Zecco charges a fee for that functionality. I would recommend Zecco to any buy-and-hold investor who wants to slowly get into stocks. While Sharebuilder offers the same "nibble" methodology, Zecco is completely free for 10 trades/month if your account is worth $2500 or more.