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Re: portfolio management application



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Colin,

At the retail level????  While I can't say for certain,  I'd be willing to
make a large bet that it doesn't exist without doing some nasty kludging.
There is no demand that would make it economically worth while to develop.

I've been away from the mutual & pension fund world for a while but I
remember the problems that existed then with vanilla systems.  Pension fund
trustees like State Street, Chase, Brown Brothers, BOA all had fairly basic
portfolio accounting systems that provided accounting and valuation of
stocks and bonds in multiple currencies.  There wasn't anything beyond that
at the time except possibly at the boutique level which meant that it was
largely untested.  Mutual funds tend to be specialised enough that there
isn't the need to record keep multiple security types under within a fund
other than balanced funds. A bond fund can be a true bitch because of the
fixed income world's tendency to come up with a new mousetrap on a fairly
frequent basis.  Maybe a few have options as well.  If you can find one with
all the security types you mention and they have a daily valuation cycle,
you might just be on to something because it's really expensive and prone to
numerous and possibly huge errors to use a patchwork system on a daily
basis.  I suspect that you won't find one.  After all, funds tend to
specialise and not invest in every possible type of security.

You might find something in the hedgefund world but it may be cobbled
together since most hedge funds probably don't have daily NAV calculation
(they don't want daily shareholder cash flows) although they hopefully do
have some rough and dirty total portfolio valuation.  Their valuation is
likely to be at the unintegrated security type level for investment decision
making and then an integrated total portfolio level for periodic client
reporting.

Even an the pro level, it's a tough exercise.

Portia (
http://www.tf-softwaresolutions.com/our_solutions/straight_through_processin
g/portia/ ) was one of the leading players a few years ago.  Having a quick
peek at their website suggests to me that they still don't have the kind of
product that you are looking for although they still make the same claims
that they used to.  Maybe they deliver today.  The same applies to Advent
( http://www.advent.com/index.asp )  Even one of the big bureau operations
like FMC ( http://www.fmco.com/default.asp ) doesn't seem to be able to
handle the kind of portfolio you are talking about.


> The PMAs that I've looked at can't even automate the simultaneous split of
a
> stock and its options

All of the fund companies can handle this either through their internal
systems or through the external bureaux that they may use.  They been able
to do it for years.

> I'd like to hear from anyone interested in a PMA project.

I certainly don't want to discourage you but this is no small project.  In
fact, it's one mother of a project.  When I was a wage slave, I was involved
in two system conversions and one "find-me-a-system" project.  They were
challenging to say the least.  Did we get what we needed?  In the first two
cases, yes but after two years of work  and at huge cost.  In the last case,
I don't know because I got religion, saw the light and finally figured out
that that I should be working for me.  Before I quit though,  we were up to
our eyeballs in systems that didn't even do correctly what they claimed to
be able to do, never mind what we needed them to do.  And none of them were
much more than multicurrency for stocks and bonds.

Best of luck,
Season's best,
Mike