During the last quarter we've been hard at work adding new features to Portfolio Insight. We're excited about these new capabilities and how they can help you drive your investment returns.
First off, we're thrilled to announce that Ferdi Scheepers from DivGro has joined the Portfolio Insight team as Product Strategist! You can read about this great news here. Ferdi is one of the top authors in the dividend investing community and brings a wealth of knowledge to Portfolio Insight. On top of that, Ferdi is a specialist in computer graphics and visualization. Ferdi will be using these unique skills to drive product strategy and the Portfolio Insight roadmap. As you try out this new version of Portfolio Insight, you'll quickly discover many of the new features Ferdi has already been instrumental in driving.
As value-based investors, we're firm believers in the notion that fair value is arrived at by examining a company's fundamentals from multiple angles. One metric isn't enough to determine a stock's fair value. We also believe that in order to uncover fair value, you need to blend a stock's historical performance with its future prospects.
Portfolio Insight has provided three ways to determine fair value: the P/E-Based Historical Chart; the Dividend Channel Chart; and the Dividend Yield History Chart. Each chart used a different methodology for showing fair value, and taken together they provide a unique perspective on valuation. The classic P/E-based chart offered a historically-grounded view, while the dividend yield-based charts used dividend payments as a basis for valuation. For dividend growth companies, not only could you use earnings as a basis for valuations, but you could further refine that view based on dividend payments. Dividends don't lie!
One of our goals this quarter was to improve these fair value tools. We noticed that the P/E-Based Chart and Dividend Channel Chart were similar. This lead us to research a common methodology for both that would also yield more accurate and useful results.
What we came up with is a fair value methodology that can take P/E history or dividend-yield history as inputs and output not only the historical fair value range, but also a fair value price and twelve-month target price. Let's take a look at the new chart:
The power of this approach is that fair value can be determined based on each stock's specific historical performance and attributes. It also does not rely on general market assumptions as some approaches do. Furthermore, this new approach also blends analyst opinions and future expectations. In the case of the P/E chart, the inputs include analyst consensus estimates. For both P/E and Dividend Channels, a LOESS regression is performed to smooth the overvalue and undervalue price lines, which also adjusts for expectations.
The new methodology relies on Median Absolute Deviation to measure fair value. How Portfolio Insight does this is a topic for another article. An import benefit of this new approach is that it arrives at a current fair value price and a twelve-month target price. Based on this data. Portfolio Insight now displays a stock's fair value and upside potential on the performance page:
And the upside potential:
Because the P/E and Dividend Channel approaches to fair value are now based on a common methodology, we decided to combine these into a single fair value section. We also renamed "Dividend Channel" to "Yield Fair Value". You can now access both charts from the "Fair Value" menu:
We decided to take the concept of fair value and twelve-month target prices further by extending them to your holdings and overall portfolio. On the position page for each of your holdings as well as the account overview, you will see a twelve month upside estimate. This estimate is the value of your holding (or holdings) based on the twelve month target price:
One of our goals with Portfolio Insight is to use the power of computer automation to analyze your portfolio metrics and provide actionable information. We want Portfolio Insight to do that number crunching so that you have more clarity and are better equipped to make strategic decisions about your investments.
As part of this effort we have started to introduce Assisted Insights. Behind the scenes, Portfolio Insight analyzes all securities and your holdings to derive key information and statistics. Assisted Insights will appear throughout the app. Let's take an example of portfolio-related assisted insights, which appear in the Portfolio Overview section:
Assisted Insights are interactive, so you can click on them and they will take you to the underlying chart which provides more information and context. These insights also appear for each of your holdings:
You'll also notice we paid a lot of attention to improving Portfolio Insight's interface and navigation. We altered the color palette to make charts more consistent and readable. Here's an example of how we changed time-series charts to use shading to distinguish portfolio gain from the S&P benchmark:
Perhaps the most notable change is the navigation bar is now sticky (it remains fixed as you scroll) and dark gray to offset it from other areas of a page:
We received feedback that it was also tedious to navigate through different charts when viewing your portfolio or a ticker. To improve this, we added the ribbon bar, which allows you to quickly switch between charts by clicking on icons. The ribbon bar is accessed by clicking on the right-most icon in the navigation menu:
This will switch the app from menu-based navigation to the icon-based ribbon bar:
The ribbon bar is available for all navigation menus, including the Portfolio, Watch List and Search sections.
We also added a ticker history in the top menu. This history remembers the last five tickers you viewed and enables you to quickly jump between them:
In addition to the cosmetic changes, we also improved many of the sections and charts throughout Portfolio Insight. For example, we added a company profile to the Fundamentals section:
We also reorganized and combined some of the sections to make information more accessible. For example, we combined filings with fundamentals and moved Events to the Performance Overview section:
We are always looking to make it easier for our subscribers to contact us if they have questions, feature requests, or feedback. So, we added an in-app support page, which can be accessed from the profile icon in the upper right:
We're already hard at work on the next set of features for Portfolio Insight. These include custom worksheet templates and unique quality metrics such as a dividend safety score. In the meantime, give us a shout and let us know how we can help with your investing needs!
