Info for UK Investors

StockMarketEye supports UK securities from the London Stock Exchange (LSE). 

You can also setup your portfolios to be denominated in British Pounds.

Ticker Symbols for UK Stocks

You can search for ticker symbols of the securities you want to track using the "Ticker Symbol" field of the entry window.

Although the first entry in the search results is often from a US exchange, you can see the exchange on which the symbol trades under the name on the right-hand side of the search results.

Yahoo Finance Ticker Symbols

Ticker symbols for securities that trade on non-US exchanges have an  exchange suffix added by Yahoo! Finance in order to differentiate them from securities on other exchanges that have the same symbol.

In the case of UK securities that trade on the LSE, their ticker symbols are suffixed with a “ .L”. For example, Lloyds Banking Group, whose ticker symbol on the LSE is “LLOY”, on Yahoo! Finance is “LLOY.L”. British Sky Broadcasting Group on the LSE is “BSY” but on Yahoo! Finance is “BSY.L”. Tesco PLC on the LSE is “TSCO”, but on Yahoo! Finance is “TSCO.L”.

If you are having problems finding your ticker symbols with the built-in symbol search, you can go to the Yahoo! Finance UK & Ireland website and use any symbol you find there directly in StockMarketEye. 

MSN Ticker Symbols

MSN Money also has their own system of ticker symbol naming, but their ticker symbols can not be directly entered or searched for in StockMarketEye - You must search by name for the security you are interested in and select it from the dropdown search results list. MSN Money tickers have the green butterfly logo on the left.

Note that Yahoo's data is generally more extensive and complete than MSN Money data. Therefore, we recommend using Yahoo Finance ticker symbols, and only use MSN Money ticker symbols if Yahoo's data for the security you are interested in is incomplete or non-existent.  

Setup Portfolios for British Pounds

In StockMarketEye, each portfolio has a currency in which the total value of the portfolio is displayed. Within the portfolio, you can have items denominated in different currencies. StockMarketEye will convert the value of those items to the currency of the portfolio, when calculating the portfolio’s total value.

To change a portfolio’s currency, select your portfolio in the Folders list, then click on the More menu on the toolbar and select Properties from the dropdown.

On the Properties screen, go to the “Portfolio” tab. Here you can change the "Portfolio Currency" from US Dollars to British Pounds. Click the Apply button for the changes to take effect.

Please Note

It is best to set the correct currency when you create the portfolio or at the latest, before adding any transactions to the portfolio. Changing the currency after you already have added transactions may lead to inconsistent values due to exchange rate differences (changing the currency of the portfolio does not change exchange rate values of any transactions you have entered). If this happens to you, you can verify the currency and exchange rates of all your transactions in the Transactions report and then modify them if necessary. Finally, you may then need to rebuild the portfolio from the transactions.

Default Currency Settings

By default, StockMarketEye creates portfolios with US Dollars as the currency. You can change this, as well as the currency used in the top-level "Portfolios" group, to use British Pounds.

See: Changing the Default Currency

Pounds and Pence

Most securities in on the London exchange are priced in Pence. When you enter a trade in StockMarketEye and the symbol is from the London exchange, StockMarketEye will assume that the security is priced in Pence. It will set the Currency field to be "British Pence (GBX)". If your portfolio's currency is Pounds, the Rate field will be left at 1 and StockMarketEye will handle conversion between Pence and Pounds where appropriate.

There are some securities on the London exchange that are priced in Pounds, Euros or even Dollars. If you know that the specific security that you are using trades in something other than Pence, you can change the Currency field as appropriate. If you are unsure, we recommend leaving the Currency in Pence and edit it later if necessary.

In general, the Currency of the holding should match the currency of the quotes StockMarketEye receives from the data providers. When they match, StockMarketEye can make adjustments and conversions as appropriate to match the portfolio's currency. If they don't match, you will see discrepancies in the totals.

In rare cases, there are discrepancies between the data provider's current quotes and historical quotes. For example, the current quote might be in Pence, but the historical quotes are in Pounds. StockMarketEye tries to adjust for this type of discrepancy, but it is not possible to automatically adjust in 100% of the cases. If you see differences in the Prices view vs values in the Back-in-Time or Summary reports, it could be due to this type of discrepancy. You can verify this by checking the current quotes you see in the Prices view vs the prices you see in the Back-in-Time report or the historical chart.