Last week saw the launch of a new tool called MoneySights. I was one of those with an early invite to test it out. So here I am, pleased by it, and blogging it’s review, because I know many of us need it!
First impression of MoneySights is an amazing usability. It is intuitive, clean, uncluttered, fast and neat web 2.0 interface. It really isn’t very common for an Indian company to create such experience!
So what is MoneySights? It’s a fusion of various tools which will make the life easier for any investor.Today, a common Indian investor is hesitant, if not totally cynical about his investments. This is where MoneySights helps minimize the hovering indecisiveness through various tools. Here’s a detailed service synopsis for the intelligent investor:
Find investments:
You can discover great stocks and mutual funds with MoneySights. It helps you plan investments in a better manner. Here’s how:
Stocks:
You can compare and find stocks using criteria like market cap, upside potential, financial strength etc. For easier comparison, MoneySights enables a selective view where you will see only those columns you want. Further, an advanced view filters stocks in your desired range on basis of EBITDA, P/E ratio, financial strength rating or any other metric you want to use.
You can even shortlist to tsee the stocks only from Large/Mid/Small cap or from a particular sector (Auto/Banking/Tech) or indices (Nifty/Sensex/BSE-100 and more).
While hunting for a catch here,I realised that its nothing but these parameters that anyone will use in finding the best suitable stock! In fact as a plus, their tech team knows how to put it all together nicely!
Click here to start finding best stocks.
This is the kind of table your search results will yield. Here, you can go inside any stock link to find out more details about that particular stock.
Apart from usual features like graphs, gain/loss, traded volumes and P/E, this page has more to offer for a stock researcher. It shows comparison of a stock’s return with its counterparts in same sector, indices, Bank FD and Gold for a selected time period.
MoneySights has also devised an algorithm to find out financial strength of a stock (in terms of star ratings). The ratings are largely based on four aspects:
- Company’s current financial position
- Company’s income generation capability
- Liabilities
- Efficiency of running its business.
Here’s a screenshot of RIL (Reliance Industries Ltd) to give you an idea of tool.
Mutual Funds
Similar to stocks, you can research and find great mutual funds in MoneySights. You can sort fund on basis of fund size, return grade ratings, safety ratings, YoY returns.
Funds can also be filtered by categories like Equity (diversified/Tax saving/Index/Sector/Balanced) or Debt (Short/Long term/FMP/MIP/Money market) or by fund house (with multiple select option).
To research more into a fund, you can click on fund name to go in details.
On MoneySights, an individual detailed mutual fund page shows
- Its return comparison with SENSEX/NIFTY. SENSEX comes by default is for 2 reasons – consistency of comparison & at times some funds who have wierd benchmarks like MSCI, Customized benhmarks – data for which isn’t available. So, MS have a drop down to select which graph to show.
By a popular belief it’s considered that a fund is not good if it can’t beat its benchmark index, which makes it an important parameter in fund selection. - Comparison with category avg returns and where the fund stands among its peers.
- Fund’s Performance Report Card consisting of Return grade (similar to ValueResearchOnline) and Safety grade.
- Graphs with details such as fund’s allocation to equity, debt and money market.
- Graph with investment distributed sector wise.
- Graph with percentage allocation to different stocks.
Tax Planning:
You can enter an investment amount, your risk profile and system suggests you an investment plan.
This is great tool for starters. You can put any investment value between 10,000 and 120,000 and based on your risk appetite, system suggests where to put your money. It automatically divided the amount into safe (PPF and NSC) and equity based (ELSS) investments.
In equity based investments, it shows top ELSS mutual funds showing their annualized return over last 3 years.
Click here to try out this tax saving recommendation tool yourself. Below is a screenshot from the tool. Click on image to enlarge.
Improvement Areas: Well even God isn’t perfect! So here are some grey areas in this MoneySights tool!
- Apart from NSC and PPF; NPS and tax saving fixed deposits could have been added.
- NSC is taxable at withdrawal so it’s not that great investment. Tax saving fixed deposit is also a similar investment with five years lock-in.
- No mention of insurance. Although insurance is not a investment and does not fall into MoneySights domain. But it makes sense for investor (here tax saver) to get term insurance and save tax on premium deposited. Here Indian common investor could have been educated on Term insurance and its need.
- If you put saving amount as 1.2 lakh, it does not show infra bonds investments in recommendations. (80-c max limit is 1 lakh and 20k is extra u/s 80CCF).
Portfolio
Above mentioned research tools are good for finding out your next investment target. But what about getting personalized correction/improvement recommendations. This is a pretty unique concept which MoneySights has come up with.
You can add stocks/mutual funds to your portfolio. Start typing in and it will suggest the full name with auto-complete options.
While adding mutual fund, you can provide SIP details too, like start date, frequency and date of execution. It even support adding missed SIP.
Good part is that it asks for investment amount and not the NAV and units. The reason is simple, people don’t buy with units at the top of their minds!
Once you provide your investment details, tool will show interesting inferences like given here. My personal favourite is the fourth one!
- Total portfolio profit/loss for all your investments till date. This will include dividend earned on stocks and mutual funds (in case of invested with dividend option). You can see both annualized return and net return for more than a year investments.
- It can find out what are strengths and weakness of your portfolio like too much dependent on a particular sector (which is sometimes risky), too many small caps etc.
- It can automatically suggest replacement for non-performing funds and stocks. And even suggests you to add more based on your risk profile.
- It also calculates your risk score based upon your portfolio investments and recommends a suitable portfolio for this score.
Using the MoneySights portfolio you can periodically review & manage your investments to reduce risk & generate better returns.
Improvement Areas: An overall-overhaul that I’m sure will come up soon!
- I earlier had my account on MoneySights but did not remember password. I tried using forget password option but password reset email never reached my inbox. So I had to create new user with an different Email ID which was frankly, painful!
- No account verification mail was sent on registration. Isn’t it almost criminal for a financial product in a web 2.0 environment?
- Added 2-3 MFs and it hanged and there was no response from server for some time.
- Entry/exit load not considered on mutual funds. But it has been mentioned in website as a known issue.
- Could not find provision to enter dividend reivestment option for mutual fund investment. I have ELSS SIPs in div-reinvest mode for obvious reasons so my portfolio in MS is misaligned with actual.
- Manually adding investments is a big pain. They should have automatically fetching of transactions from trading/investment and mutual funds accounts (like Perfios and Intuit). I know that Indians don’t like to share their credential because of the trust factor, but both manual and auto option could have been kept. Things are changing after all, aren’t they? I have been informed that they earlier had this feature but don’t know why this has been removed. Could it be a bit complex to handle at back-end?
Future
Soon MoneySights will launch an online investment portal, where people can research and buy mutual funds. I hope they will do it soon and match shoulders with FundsIndia and FundSupermart too.
There are not many competitors in this space. Both FundsIndia and FundSupermart are purely online transaction website with a not so good UI/UX. They do no offer any research tools or does not have portfolio features. MS has come up with unique angle of investment. Investment through research and learning can be a great USP.
Lets see how MS performs in future but Remember, it’s just the beginning!
Another thing comes to my mind , if they do good, they can be a good international acquisition target too (remember Intuit bought Mint)
To end this article, I suggest you start your account with MoneySights, play around and let them know your feedback.
Excellent software. I liked it. It is infact better than moneycontrol paid software
@Mayank
This is different than Moneycontrol and is not just any other portfolio tool.
Thanks Mayank. We are glad to hear that. You may be happy to hear that we will continue to remain free, forever!
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Santosh Navlani, moneysights.com
Hi Pankaj,
Thanks for sharing this detail about moneysights. We are glad that you feel that moneysights can make life easier for an investor.
Also appreciate the improvement areas shared here. Some of the areas are result of purposeful action from our side, while for some, my comments are below –
1. Forgot password – it pretty much works smoothly. However, at times there may be delays or problems where we provide an option to re-send. Also, in rare cases, the reset password link lands in spam.
2. Account verification – Its purposefully done this way. We want our users to get started as soon as possible after registering. In future, once we introduce transactional features, ofcourse the verification would be done. Also, if you notice, we never send password in the email once you click on forgot password. We send a reset link which helps you generate one for yourself.
3. No response from server – Would appreciate if you can elaborate more on this. My email is santosh.navlani AT moneysights COM. Would like to add, this at times happens if you try to add a fund on today’s date. Since we don’t have NAVs available, before next day morning, this kind of problem happens. This issue is identified & would be solved for in next release.
4. Dividend re-investment – This would be made available soon. Issue has been identified already.
5. Automatic fetching – You may be aware that we had this feature. But we observed most of the users who buy from offline world (majority of us buy offline) & in these cases, very few users have HPINs, etc. Supporting both automated & manual was a problem because it was compromising the on user-friendliness of moneysights – one of our biggest USPs. Hence we decided to do away with it.
All of us at moneysights would ensure that we become the simplest way to discover, plan, manage, invest online for Mutual Funds for retail investors in India.
Would request your readers to feel free to share problems/suggestions, if any, freely with us directly or through the comments in this post.
Thanks!
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Santosh Navlani, on behalf of moneysights team
It is an excellent website on investments,shares . It is very fast and very useful from investor’s point of view. Moreover the website designed in very logical manner and is very user friendly.
Thanks
Just tried it.
Very smooth, fast, intuitive and adds value to your personal financial research and tracking.
It wouldn’t harm to have an option to fetch/import your portfolio from other sites like moneycontrol considering that the people who would want to latch on to moneysight may already be a customer of moneycontrol and it would cut down their transition time.
All the best!
Thanks for the appreciation, PV. i can only say 1 thing, we will work towards creating tools & features that either reduces this transition time or eliminates them as we move along.
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Santosh Navlani | moneysights.com
can a portfolio already fed in money control can be imported
Hi Kumar,
No. Currently, we aren’t supporting import options. However, i can assure you that even if you more than 5-6 Mutual Funds, it will be extremely simple way to enter your data. All you have to do is tell us mode of investment, amount & date. Unlike other sites, we don’t ask for average price per unit or number of units. We do this maths on our own.
Hope this helps. Feel free to try for 1 fund to check its efficiency.
Thanks!
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Santosh Navlani | moneysights.com
MoneySights is a very good portal for analysing and feed back. since the password verifications are not so stringent, is the portal secure enough to divulge Mutual fund Folio numbers,where by one can be tracked down/misused.
Hi Santosh, Is MS secure enough to share your portfolio info as security is major concern like giving ECS mandate to MS & others rights & priviledges.
Thanks
Ashutosh
Hi Ashutosh,
Thanks for your query. i appreciate your concern. i can just answer this by saying yes, we are secure. But then, only a proof of best case scenario & worst case scenario would address this better.
First things first – moneysights is 1 of the only few sites that uses Verisign 256-bit SSL layer & a McAfee daily scan – the top-most names in security worldwide. This ensures that communication can’t be intercepted. Once would require super-computing capabilities to get into. Now this the best case. So, imagine somebody did find moneysights worthy enough for stealing data, the data has to be useful for him/her. UNFORTUNATELY, it isn’t. Even after an attempt to steal which in itself is big.
If one gets access to your moneysights account (which again is ONLY possible when you share the password), all one can do is sell an investment. And even if he sells, the proceeds will come into your account. Now why investment can’t be made – Because, for lumpsum buying, one needs your online bank credentials which aren’t available to us or anyone except yourself. And even if it does, the investment would be in your name & ofcourse redemption would also hit your account again! ECS data is not a threat as per the ECS mandate the money would go directly into the AMC account.
i guess i have addressed your concern. Look forward to have you use & experience the simplicity of investing through moneysights.
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Santosh Navlani | moneysights | making investing simple
Hi Santosh,
I came up to MoneySight only from Pankaj’s Blog. Kudos to your efforts.
When i was signing up, it was asking for Financial Details ranging from salary to
nomination which is ok, but when asking for PAN Details and Bank Details, i felt
awkward. Could you please highlight on this.
Regards,
Subha
hi Subha,
Thanks for the appreciation.
To answer your query – if it was left to the businessman in me, i wouldn’t even ask you who you are, leave aside other details & still allow you to buy/invest in Mutual Funds
. i mean i won’t even want you to fill-up the form…just select the fund & press buy button, like you do to buy a flight ticket/or book online. But unfortunately, we are under strict regulation & need to follow them by the book.
As per SEBI guidelines, PAN card is mandatory for all investments. Not only that we also need to do a KYC for you – where are the details like salary are mandatory. Your own Bank account number is mandatory because again 3rd party payments are not allowed. So, we not only ask you for account number but also submit a “cancelled” cheque alongwith the signed application to verify that you really hold that account. ALL this in the name of “following rules”.
i can only sympathize with your discomfort…but can’t help as otherwise your can’t invest. Btw, you will be asked these details even if you choose to do offline investment from your advisor/ agent. Having said that, these details are part of KYC and they straight go to CDSL – the new KRA (KYC Registration Authority). There is no other purpose of this information.
i hope i have addressed your query here. Feel free to comment/ write back in case i need to give any other details, whatsoever.
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Santosh Navlani | moneysights.com | making investing simple
Hi Santosh
I recently started using MoneySights and it is an amazing experience for me. Many thanks for completing my ‘KYC requirement’.
Just though of asking you, do you have any plans to extend your support to Pefios.com, I use Pefios to manage and track my bank transactions and demat transaction.
I use my company email ID as my login ID, there is no option in the website to change it to my personal ID.
Hi Subash,
Thanks for choosing moneysights & many thanks for the appreciation.
Extending support to perfios is not under our control only….its upto them whether they want to offer their users linking their moneysights account to perfios. Should they decide to support, we will more than happy to co-operate.
Would suggest you to write to their support team for this…and we will extend our co-operation to them.
On change of email id – yes, there is no option to change it online currently. We will definitely make it available soon. However, whenever there is a need to change it from your side in an extreme case, we will definitely honor the request to allow you to change. But, it would be better if you can wait for this feature to go live on the site & change it yourself.
Hope this helps.
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Santosh Navlani | moneysights.com | making investing simple
Thank you Santosh !
When I decided to join moneysights.com , it was a paid service, by the time my documents with the cheque reached you, you have made it as a free service.
Why not continue to offer the paid service? in addition to be a MF purchase/redeem platform, you can offer email service (emai ID with moneysights domain) as well.
Moneysights email ID can be used as a login credential for other financial avisory forums as well.
The personal email accounts whatever we have will be filled with spams , advertisements etc if we are away for a week.
Hi Subash,
Thanks for your suggestions. Well, we have never thought on offering an email service. But interesting to hear this suggestion.
We went free to remove the hindrances people face to try a service thats asking some convenience fee. We now will be free & may introduce some advance planning features that will be paid for. But thats future…
Keep using moneysights…and do help us spread the word around. Positive recommendations from existing users like you is our only way to reach out more people.
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Santosh Navlani