KEY POINTS:
New Zealanders like to think of themselves as a bunch of DIYers -better to look after things yourself than pay some outsider.
And local entrepreneur Tony Ryburn is betting that this approach to owning and trading shares will translate to a home-grown online success story.
He calls it Sharesight - an online product that Ryburn says gives smaller share owners a better way of tracking investments without paying big bucks to traditional full-service brokers.
"I started getting involved in shares about 12 years ago and like a lot of Kiwis I'm a bit of a do-it-yourselfer, so I used to use online or telephone broker services and that means that you don't have a full service broker, you don't have a custodial services that take care of your shares for you."
"So you don't know how your shares are doing, you've got no way of knowing easily how your shares are doing for the tax department."
For a monthly $5 fee, a subscriber can have Sharesight keep track of one portfolio, with shares from 5 companies. A $19 monthly subscription monitors three portfolios with an unlimited number of companies.
An accountant by training but with more recent experience in the banking industry, Ryburn says his own frustrations with a complicated home-built share tracking system helped spark the idea for Sharesight.
"I started building an Excel spreadsheet to keep all his shares in, that grew like topsy, grew bigger and bigger, becoming ever more complicated.
I always had the idea that if I got the right software engineering resource behind me I could build it into an online site."
Armed with the computer skills of his son Scott(who helped build his legendary spreadsheet), Ryburn set to work last year with two software engineers building Sharesight. With trials successfully over, the system is now operational and looking for customers.
And he wastes little time when asked why Sharesight is better than free online portfolio systems already on the market.
It gives an annualised return for each share, and it also factors in dividends.
Many of the other sites don't have a currency converter on them for the Australian shares. And you don't normally get all the information you need from an online service to put together a proper tax return.
"The main thing is the annualised return, the automatic production of tax reports, the fact you can produce accounts for a family trust or company," he says.
With world equity markets going through some turbulence in the past year, Ryburn is still confident his product will be popular with home share owners who prefer to do their own thing online.
"There's very good stats in Australia showing that it's clearly becoming a lot more popular there. That's good for us, because people that trade online through an online broker are obviously computer savvy enough to operate our system with ease."
"We are really aiming at that DIY direct investors. They don't want to own them through a managed fund; they want to own them directly."
More than 38 per cent of Australians use an online broker to buy their shares, says Ryburn, with another smaller group still using phone brokers."
And the Australians are definitely much more active share investors than New Zealanders, he says with probably about 5 times the population and 20 times the amount of interest in owning shares.
And it's across the ditch that Sharesight is heading next. And here where Ryburn and his fellow investors are hoping to take Sharesight to a much bigger level.
"We are keen on the Australian market, the vast majority of Australians only own Australian shares, so our system should hit the mark for a big percentage of them."
A few tweaks are needed before the foray across the Tasman - a change in some terms - "franking" instead of "imputation" for example, and the inclusion of capital gains tax calculations, but all historical Australian share data has been bought, meaning the transition shouldn't be huge.
And despite the popularity of direct share investing in Australia, there is no strong competitor that can do what Sharesight does, says Ryburn.
"None of them have the functionality of ours - at least none that we've been able to find."
