Fair Shares All Round

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Share Analyser, from Synergy Software, has been designed to aid investors who have a small portfolio of shares to manage. I found it a pleasure to use. It has superb graphplotting capabilities.

There are disc and cassette versions which are apparently quite different in the way data is entered and stored. I have only examined the disc version and this allows up to 20 different investments to be handled.

To begin, the user would enter the details of the shares owned - the portfolio. As items are subsequently bought and sold the portfolio details would be brought up to date - number of shares and their purchase or selling price.

Expenses and dividends received can also be recorded and up to 16 lines of information can be stored for each share.

The market price of each share can be entered at any desired frequency - for example, at the end of each day.

The program simply provides 1,000 slots for the price information of each share and these can be used as desired although a careful manual record would have to be kept as to what date (or hour) each slot represented.

It is easy to amend either single entries or whole ranges of share prices.

Using the latest share prices, the program will evaluate the portfolio and work out how much notional profit has been made. Some temporary changes can be made to the data before this is done - for example to take account of estimated selling expenses.

When the share price charting option is selected the program's graph capabilities become apparent. The graphs can be automatically scaled or the user can choose the X and Y ranges.

Graphs of different shares can be superimposed and the result labelled and printed.

Various statistical processes which may be of help to investors can also be carried out - plotting centred or lagged moving averages, rise and fall indicators and low indicators.

In summary, an excellent program which I found very easy to use and which should be of considerable interest to anyone with a small portfolio of stock exhange investments.

Ken Garrett