Getquin review: The Best Free Portfolio Management Tool for you?
This is an older blog post and doesn’t reflect the current state of GetQuin. An update is imminent!
One of the biggest issues you can face as an investor is keeping track of your portfolio in a clear and intuitive way. Getquin, a new European portfolio management (web)app, can help you with that.
I’ve been using this online social portfolio management tool for 3 months with great success. In this post, I’d like to share how this app has provided me with a free platform to manage the multiple portfolios I have. As a bonus, I’m connected to thousands of investors sharing their portfolios and knowledge with the community.
Before Getquin, I used Excel. It’s possible to get a decent dashboard with up-to-date stock data, but it felt like walking on legos every time I had to update it. And even using the fanciest designs it remained anything but user-friendly in my opinion.
How to get started with Getquin
The process is straightforward.
- Download the app on Android or iOS for free or go to getquin.com,
- Follow the wizard and within 5 minutes you have a profile set up ready to start adding your portfolio(s).
As a first step, you have to select your current location. In my case this was Belgium.
Optionally, you can specify your gender.
In the next step, you can choose from an extensive list of investment topics you are interested in getting news and information about. Getquin will populate your social feed with news and users sharing about these topics or companies.
Step 3 asks you to set your personal goals. What do you wish to achieve with your portfolio(s)?
This fourth step is more extensive as it has 8 steps to finalize your personal profile. Each step is a specific element of your profile but only the first two are mandatory, so it can go very fast:
- Privacy setting (mandatory): Is your profile public it private?
- Pick your username (mandatory): self-explanatory I’d say.
- Write about yourself: Write a small bio that will be visible for visitors to read when they visit your profile page as you can find on mine.
- Profile image: You can show the world a pretty picture or nothing, whatever you want.
- Find friends: Connect to Facebook and invite friends to join. Or connect with those that are already on the platform.
- Follow investors: Based on your previously selected interests and goals you get a selection of like-minded people to follow.
- Invite friends: Share your profile on various social media or share your profile link.
- Done! You can start.
Given the ease of creating an account, I decided to give this new app a run. At best, I would access an excellent way to track my many portfolios over different asset classes. At worst, I wasted some time and gave some info to a European startup. Could be worse.
Your first portfolio
Once your account is created, you can add a variety of portfolios. Ranging from your house to your crypto accounts such as Coinbase and Crypto.com.
Each portfolio you add gets the same sections:
- Portfolio: Gives you a graph of your portfolio’s overall performance and your positions.
- Sales: Which positions you have closed over the portfolio’s lifetime. This view is minified.
- Performance: How well your portfolio performed over a given time period.
- Breakdown: Gives a detailed view per region, asset class, position, or sector.
- Dividends: Any dividend you received and dividends you will receive in the coming months.
- Transactions: Shows all your individual transactions.
Once you have made your first portfolio, it’s time to add your positions in the form of transactions.
Adding transactions
Adding any transaction happens in a very similar fashion regardless of the type of asset.
Select the portfolio you wish to add the transaction to and go to the bottom of the page. Here you also see an overview of all your past transactions, including upcoming dividends—a neat little future.
Here comes the first drawdown, though. You can only add your transactions manually for almost all bank and investment accounts.
Manually adding your transaction
If you have multiple portfolios, make sure you select a specific portfolio before you start; otherwise, you can’t add a transaction.
For the sake of giving this platform a fair shot, I actually committed myself to manually adding every transaction I made over the years on all of my portfolios/accounts.
Yes, this includes the cashback I receive on an almost daily basis through my crypto.com Debit card. Hundreds of transactions for hours on end. I think I started getting carpal tunnel syndrome near the end.
Automation is clearly a part they still need to work on. In their defense, while PSD2 allows them to get information from others, it’s very cumbersome and requires customers to authenticate frequently. So for the moment, it’s only reserved for German users.
Detailed overview of each position
Each portfolio has a detailed view of all your stocks positions:
- You see the name
- How many shares you own
- The total size in your portfolio
- How much profit or loss you’ve made so far
- Relative or absolute return
But there is more. Get into the nitty-gritty by clicking on a position and finding all its related company information.
Not only is your position visible here, but also those of like-minded traders in the Getquin community. On top of that, you also see the community’s opinion on this stock. Analyst Ratings and the stock’s financials help finalize the picture.
Besides your current positions, you will also see the sales you’ve done in the past.
The aggregated overview
Each portfolio comes together in your aggregated portfolio. Have multiple accounts? All your positions are combined into one extensive portfolio overview in the aggregated portfolio.
Don’t like having a specific portfolio part of it? Toggle it, and nobody but you will see it. Give each portfolio a descriptive name to help distinguish and easily switch between them.
Like the individual portfolio, your aggregated one has the same sections allowing you to get a birds-eye view of your financial situation.
Getquin’s other selling points
Getquin positions itself as a social all-in-one portfolio manager. The latter portion of the description clearly ticks quite some boxes, but the app and website have more to offer:
- Social platform
- Explore investment ideas
- Powerful search and real-time quotes for stocks crypto, forex, and indices
Social platform
Probably the most unique feature of Getquin is that you can share your stock picks with other like-minded people and exchange ideas and trades. Other apps like Delta offer portfolio management but lacks any form of real social interaction.
Explore investment ideas
Once you have seen the latest actions of the community, you might feel eager to start a new position. Getquin got you covered here as well.
You can explore articles and guides about gold, trackers, cryptocurrencies, etc.
This still needs some work, though. At times there isn’t a whole lot of useful info.
Powerful search and real-time quotes
To get such an overview of your stock picks, you first have to find them. Getquin enables its users to find any and all effects. Be it traditional stocks or the more volatile crypto market.
Other apps such as Delta provide a similar feature and give similar results, but Getquin does better at providing info on European stocks. Take my Kinepolis position. The graph on getquin is up to date and accurate. Delta? Not so much. Their data is completely lacking in the daily time frame.
On the other hand, Delta gives more technical details about the stock; even my Kinepolis example has stuff like shares outstanding, average volume, etc., something Getquin clearly misses.
How safe is Getquin?
Getquin is definitely on the safe side of portfolio management apps.
This is because Getquin doesn’t actually allow its users to make any trades on their portfolio accounts via the app. Users can only connect their (German) exchange accounts or add their transactions manually for the purpose of tracking their latest trades on the exchanges and their current crypto holdings.
This enables an incredible amount of security for Getquin users, as there is no need to worry about securing an account with access to many accounts. Of course, this comes with the tradeoff of not being able to trade assets directly in the app, which creates a bit of overall friction with the process of managing your portfolios.
The cost of Getquin
Originally, GetQuin started as a fully free platform and technically, it’s still free. But like many apps before them, they started a premium offering after a few years and moved things that were once free into this paying offering or stopped providing more useful features for free and immediately made them pay. A man’s gotta eat as they say.
At the moment, you can enjoy most of what Getquin has to offer for free. But do you want the latest and fanciest graphs? You’ll have to fork out some cash for Premium.
What’s Premium?
Below is a screenshot if their most recent offering and pricing.
Conclusion: is Getquin a good portfolio manager?
If you have multiple portfolios across different asset classes (including real estate!), this is a must-try for you.
In addition, you get the added bonus of interacting with other investors and conversing on various topics, with stocks at the center of it all.
Downsides are present as well. The main one is its automation. They are working hard to improve this, but most people will have to manually add their transactions for now. Next to that, the app lacks depth—both in terms of financial info and news.
The competition
While there is no direct competition in the sense that there is no portfolio manager that provides a live social component, they do have some completion in the broader portfolio management landscape.
The biggest one in recent months is probably Delta.
Getquin is a unique combination of a social platform and a portfolio management tool. They have nailed the social part, but need more work on the portfolio part.
Mainly international users are still left in the cold due to a lack of integration with non-German banks or tools. Most users will probably have to add their transactions manually but this process is at least easy and quick to do.
Can I give a final recommendation then? Yes. At least give them a shot, see if you like the combo they offer. At worst you lose some time.
Financial changes
As alluded to it earlier, thanks to the switch to freelancing, I made a big jump forward for my finances. Now, this doesn’t show in my salary because the entire point of going freelance is to use your company as a vehicle for financial growth.
Because Belgium’s labor taxes are the highest in the world, it’s better (if you can) to pay yourself as little as possible while keeping most of your income in your company and paying it out as dividends later. This is precisely what I’m doing now. My official salary is rather low, but the money in my company is growing at a stable pace. There are ways to take it out sooner (through a loan from my company to myself) to pay for things… like our home renovation.