Custom built portfolio tracker

[Ashley]

I know the key to investing is to be in it for the long haul, invest on a regular basis regardless of what’s happening in the markets and forget about it!

I’ve only recently started with InvestEngine (previously with Vanguard), im in the process of filtering my previous portfolio into InvestEngine.

Looking at stocks daily defiantly isn’t healthy but I just like to see the charts going up and down (mainly up!!)

I use to input my portfolio data from the InvestEngine emails at the end of a trading day into Google finance and it worked fine, but i just though i could do it better, most stock trackers online show only the specific stock and its difficult to see who your portfolio is doing during the day.

I built a script that reads my portfolio buys, (date, shares, cost), then queries a stocks API and brings back live data every 5, 15, 30, 60 minutes (whatever i set it to). Aggregates the data together and spits it out.

I went a bit crazy and bought a raspberry pi and 7" touch screen, connects by usb so whenever i turn my PC on, it boots up as a kiosk and displays my portfolio.

Here’s what the main screen looks like, i’ve got it set to 5mins so it will fetch new data and update every 5 minutes (between trading hours/days). Works out daily gains/loss and gains/loss against total investment, The EFT headers and prices change colour depending on performance (more red than green at the moment! pffft!).

You can tap each ETF and it gives a chart for that specific ETF, along with how each trade made is doing against the current share price.

Anyone else track their portfolios like this?

[jamesc]

No, I see investing as the long haul and not really bothered by the current price. i.e. I moved everything in July to S&P 500, at Christmas, I was 107k up, last week it was down to 13k up and now it is 43k up.

So I see no point in doing this, I only know how it has been going, as I keep putting anything I earn in the ETF and then see the currently Gain.

[tom.winterton]

@Ashley - Loving this!!

I had my own InvestEngine raspberry pi / dot-matrix project from the early days of lockdown.

• Nowhere near as functional as yours + my dot-matrix screen doesn’t seem to photograph well

[Myositis]

Hi Ashley, I would love something like this but wouldn’t know where to start

[Omian]

Whilst not having the expertise to create such a fabulous data feast my hunger for the same is partially sated by cross-referencing my portfolio data with that provided by Yahoo Finance on my iPhone.

I also use Yahoo Finance and Justetf.com to research ETFs not yet in my portfolio.

You might conclude that I don’t like to invest and forget rather I like to actively track my investments on a very regular basis.

[Ashley]

Wow if my portfolio went from £107k up, down to £13k up i don’t think id want to look at it hopefully you get back up there!

[Ashley]

Yeah the data is from a Yahoo Finance API, im looking at a way to reduce the API calls as your only allowed 100 per day, currently im looping through 6 EFTs per reload so im having to subscribe to a monthly plan to allow more calls.

I also watchlist a few ETFs to see how they are doing

In the end it was all just a bit of fun to see if i could do it, ive built a few sites with JSON in the past so knew what i was doing, once you organise the data you can make it do practically anything. Be nice if InvestEngine had an function to export transactions as .CSV or something so i didn’t even have to type in my transactions manually

[jamesc]

“Wow if my portfolio went from £107k up, down to £13k up i don’t think id want to look at it hopefully you get back up there!” no that is not the portfolio size, those amounts are just the gains.

My portfolio is quiet large, hence you drop a 1% or so, it make a big difference to the gains.

Thank you

[tom.winterton]

@Ashley - re .csv - This is in the plans.
(We’re actively working on a number of pieces around reporting at the moment - hopefully, you’ll start to see some of the improvements very soon)