Cash Holding
In Yahoo Finance Portfolio 2.0 when select to manage Cash Holdings the system shows a very large negative number even though no Cash Holding inputs have been made. Every time an investment is added (ETFs in this Portfolio), the Total Cash Holdings automatically increases its negative value. The system seems to either think the new investment entry is from borrowed money or some issue related to past dividends / capital gains values. Whatever the reason, it makes the portfolio value completely inaccurate and meaningless. It can only be resolved by turning off Cash Management setting, making that feature also useless and meaningless. For example, my Portfolio shows a total value of $21,500 with a Cash Holding of -$255,500 although i've inputted no Cash Holdings. The positive total amount is probably the system calculating realized & unrealized gains plus Dividends less it's assumption that i bought all these investments starting at $0, therefore with borrowed money?
Very strange design thinking for setting up a portfolio tracking system. After all, it's portfolio tracking, not total personal asset tracking.
I should add that on a second portfolio of stocks, i converted from an old portfolio to a 2.0 beta, i had only the ticker symbols, no lots of holdings. In that portfolio, i added all the lots, and then added cash holdings (various accounts separately), and this one correctly shows the amounts. I could think to just add everything (ETFs, Funds, Treasuries, etc) to this one Portfolio, but i prefer to separate holdings by security type. Unless one single large portfolio would allow the user to group by security type, i prefer to separate the portfolios. So the automated Cash Handling becomes the problem i explained above.
Last item, the top of the portfolio shows the large font number of the total (investments + cash), then below is Cash Holdings, Day Gain, Total Gain. I can use a calculator to subtract the Cash from the large font total and see my investment total, but why not just show that as part of the breakdown? Total, Market Value, Cash Holdings, Day Gain, Total Gain.
Jason Church
shared this idea
-
Stacey Gordon
commented
When the Cash Management for Cash Holdings is set to Auto the Total Cash Holdings is the Total Dividend Income minus the Total Total Cost which results in a negative Total Cash Holdings number. This also impacts the Portfolio Total at the top of the page. Total Cash should simply be the Total Dividend Income, plus proceeds from sales minus cash used for buys made after this change was implemented. The problem arises because you are using the total cost entered before this change was made.
I manually corrected this by adding a deposit in the amount of the total cost of securities purchased before this change was made. This is only a temporary manual fix.