I've been visiting their site on & off ever since I heard them get a mention... probably on some news programme like CNN or whatever, so when I eventually decided to take the plunge earlier this year and started investing in shares (via "Halifax Sharebuilder")... it was only natural I should use "The Fool" to search for tips, look-up some quotes + use their portfolio service as a back up to view how my shares were doing after the Halifax have closed that part of the share dealing part of their online banking facility after midnight......and the fool.co.uk portfolio is / was alot easier to make sense of than any other service.
It was fairly straight forward.... a green smiley face to indicate shares in a particular company was doing well, a yellow smiley with a straight mouth :-| to indicate the price had stayed put, and a Red frowny smiley to indicate the price had gone down (same colours with the numbers in the chart to go with them). There was also a bit at the top, with the left side showing how much your portfolio is worth at the moment, and the right showing you how much they'd cost you in the first place.... with the middle showing you the price change. What could be simpler?
Unfortunately around early October I started getting messages to say they were ditching this service by November 1st 2005 and transferring it to YAHOO! Finance (which is just as awkward to make sense of as the one on Halifax's online banking), with an upload tool to aid in the transition.
So now it's basically just a messageboard, news & quotes service... and not much good for anything else (otherwise I'd have given it full marks).
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Advantages: Free registration, quality advice from experts, excellent discussion boards Disadvantages: Number of posts means you can't keep up, "Official" site advice re getting a tracker