improving Portfolio Review workflow

[Rob Relyea]

While looking at a portfolio review today: Where to put $700k cash, retired yesterday (#396507), I brainstormed a new feature of portfolio reviews...

When people don't give complete (or nearly complete) info for a Portfolio Review question, there is much talking back and forth trying to get the data...
We can point people towards Asking Portfolio Questions

But I wonder if we could enhance bogle.tools/portfolio to help with the workflow... (forum post about that tool: bogle.tools/portfolio - tool to help collect and format Portfolio Review info)

Sometimes, perhaps a reviewer could type in the details that the person has shared...or some of them in bogle.tools/portfolio, then save the portfolio data file...and reply to the post, pointing the OP towards the tool and the start of their portfolio review data.

I've added a small feature to allow somebody to share a portfolio with others by URL:
1. navigate to bogle.tools/portfolio/topic/396507 it will open the portfolio details that have shared in the start of topic 396507.

At that point, they could answer more questions, import their portfolio via CSV from Vanguard/Fidelity (and more soon) and copy the enhanced post to the clipboard, and paste into their original forum post as post #1.

Note: currently I enabled sharing of that portfolio by posting typing in their portfolio details, saving it to a file, renaming that file 396507.json and uploading it to: https://github.com/bogle-tools/financia ... 96507.json
Clearly, that isn't a great way to enable sharing...we'd have to make that easier for anybody to create a portfolio file and share with others.

Anyway, I'd love comments on this idea...or any other ideas.

[Rob Relyea]

Nobody thinks anything can be improved here? Would love your thoughts.

[wetgear]

I think the exercise of filling out the portfolio review data is valuable to the topics OP. It makes them learn what data is most useful and how to find it. It also starts the conversation in a common and harmonized way decreasing confusion. The tool to simplify this task may get more people to do it but if it’s too simple it robs them of a learning opportunity that they probably really need. I think the tool has more value for established BH folks who want to quickly assemble the review even though they could do it by hand.

[Exchme]

Sounds like Rob's method would give folks an easy way to gather their data accurately and ensure it's in a consistent format.

I applaud you for trying to drag bogelheads' kicking and screaming into the 21st century! I suspect you are not getting a lot of comments because this mostly benefits folks asking for portfolio reviews and those are maybe not consistent readers/commenters on the site.

I really like the idea of your tool, I often skip over the Portfolio Review threads as I find the text-only interface for what ought to be tabular or graphic data interferes with my understanding and tries my patience. The issue you are currently addressing often leads to confusion too as inevitably the requester has left out something needed to understand their life situation and that information gets provided piecemeal throughout the thread.

If I have anything practical to add it would be that your tool needs to be clear and obvious on how to use as most folks requesting a review will never have used anything like it before.