How QLD Uni students used Sharesight to grow their portfolio by 55%

Students from The University of Queensland (UQ) have been using Sharesight to help manage and run their Student Managed Investment Fund (SMIF). The students have benefited from the ability to actively see and track the portfolio and the underlying investments in the fund, and have managed to grow the fund’s value since its inception in 2018. To find out more about how Sharesight has been helping students learn about investing, keep reading.

What is the SMIF?

In 2018, The University of Queensland (UQ) approved the allocation of $200,000 to the university’s Student Managed Investment Fund (SMIF), which was initially invested on two dates in November and December of that year. Since semester 2, 2019, student teams have managed the fund for 6-month periods.

The SMIF was established to enable UQ Business School students to apply their academic knowledge and acquire practical skills by managing a portfolio of Australian equity securities using real money in real-time. Students gain exposure to the world of asset management by assuming the role of analysts and are responsible for the construction, monitoring and management of the fund.

The current value of the portfolio is approximately $310,000. That's an incredible profit increase of 55% in just three years, which has now been reinvested into the program. In the long run, the SMIF’s investment returns will be used to support student scholarships.

How Sharesight helps students track the SMIF

Sharesight is used to track the basis point returns each month for the fund’s monthly updates, as well as to check each investment within the portfolio to identify the largest movers within the month. Sharesight gives information on alpha returns based on the ASX200 index which the fund uses for its reports, and it allows the students to see the fund’s returns on a monetary and percentage basis, from inception, year on year, and month on month.

"Sharesight has been a great addition to the UQ SMIF," says Joshua Pettman, an incumbent student portfolio manager at The University of Queensland.

"Prior to using Sharesight we managed the portfolio’s positions and performance using a large Excel spreadsheet and a Capital IQ Plugin. This required a lot of computer power and work to compile the monthly performance and ongoing tracking of the fund.

"Using Sharesight has allowed us to speed up the process significantly and get a more accurate view of the fund’s performance. We can now just add our purchases and sales to Sharesight and it automatically shows us the performance for the month and allows us to find the value of the fund at a certain date with ease. The automatic corporate actions are a big help as well, as this allows us to save time on calculating dividends and franking credits for our holdings."

Sharesight – empowering the next generation of investors

As part of our mission to empower all investors we’re excited by this story of the next generation embracing tools like Sharesight to help them be better investors and manage portfolios of all sizes. To track the ongoing progress of the SMIF, click here to read the monthly reports on the fund’s website.

And if you’re not already using Sharesight, what are you waiting for? Sign up for Sharesight so you can:

• Track all of your investments in one place, including stocks, ETFs, mutual/managed funds, property and even cryptocurrency
• Automatically track your dividend and distribution income from stocks, ETFs and mutual/managed funds
• Run powerful reports built for investors, including Performance, Portfolio Diversity, Contribution Analysis, Multi-Period and Multi-Currency Valuation
• Easily share access of your portfolio with family members, your accountant or other financial professionals so they can see the same picture of your investments as you do

Sign up for a FREE Sharesight account and get started tracking your investment performance (and tax) today.

FURTHER READING

• 7 reasons why Sharesight is better than a spreadsheet
• What your broker tells you vs what they actually mean
• 3 reasons why you need to be tracking dividends