Background
One of my clients is an investment club based in the UK. The members of the club pool their money and make investments in the stock market every year. They buy a new portfolio every year and at the end of a s stipulated time window, they are looking to make very good profits. They have a web site which had prices updated regularly, so that their members could log in and look at the value of their personal portfolio, see when a certain stock was bought, how many shares they hold in that particular stock, the buying price, the current price, the profit they have made currently, and so on.
My client needed to have this website updated manually every month. It would take up a lot of time from their staff to keep updating the website, and even after so much effort, it was almost always out of date as stock prices move daily. As the number of members grew, this became even more of an overhead.
Solution
We worked out a way of updating portfolios automatically. So what happens now is that the client’s team only needs to update the portfolio once a year, when new purchases or some transactions are made. They specify which shares were bought, the quantity, the buying price, and how many shares are allocated to which member.
The website automatically picks up the price in real time when a member logs in, and displays all numbers related to the logged in member’s portfolio: their shareholding, the price of each share and the value of every year’s portfolio, and the value of the entire portfolio taken together.
Result
My client is happy because they’ve saved effort and real money on updating the web site manually. Their members are happy because they don’t need to wait for the web site to be updated once a month, and can see all details and the total value of their entire portfolio whenever they log in.
