Ghostfolio: Open-source wealth management software(ghostfol.io) |
Ghostfolio: Open-source wealth management software(ghostfol.io) |
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
Disclosure - I work at Kubera.
The premium hosted edition of this service isn't inspiring confidence if their front page, presumably residing within the same cloud infrastructure, can't handle the HN hug of death.
Operational issues aside, I love seeing open source self-hosted breaking into retail wealth management. Right now, it seems everybody I speak to that isn't a professional or institutional investor defaults to a frankenstien combination of spreadsheets and/or web frontends exposed by banks and 'standard' wealth management sites like Wealthfront/Bettermint.
With banking / brokerage platforms like Alpaca, it's possible to create an open source roboadvisor, but I'm not sure who the market would be. Someone who is interested in algorithmic trading would go directly access the API's, and someone who wants a hands off experience could choose from existing products, or get bundled services from a big bank.
I'm squarely in the frankenstein of spreadsheets, but also made a mobile frontend in https://jch.app The people I've talked to who use spreadsheets do it because it's fun.
Outside of people who money manage for a living, most analysis tools seem to fit into a "low frequency, low pain" problem for individuals in the "retail" segment. UHNW have so many assets they need tailored help. And people with huge pain in debt don't have much time, or lack the wherewithal to manage spreadsheets or analysis apps.
For example I would like to calculate the impact of wash sale or seeing the tax impact for selling from certain lot (in terms of short/long term taxes). And if you did these what would your tax impact look like if you sold things at expected mark growth rate (or certain value you set).
Normalize spreadsheets as evergreen technology. Say no to weeb3 in 2023.
Do people with real wealth really use open source tools?
Or do they have meetings with their accountants, bankers, brokers.
This is really "wanna be wealthy" tools.
For example, you add all your accounts/investments and have the software calculate how much you need to save so that by age 65 (retirement) you have $X which you will need so that by the time you reach life expectancy (say 90 y/o) you have > 0$ left.
There is other stuff you can add in, like "I would like Y$ saved by 20XX so that I can purchase a house. How will that affect the amount I need to save now and how much will that affect my savings at retirement."
> Or do they have meetings with their accountants, bankers, brokers.
It is probably a good idea to have a financial advisor do this for you since they have the know-how (and certification depending where you live) and will know about regional benefits you can apply which can increase your "wealth". However, if you want to do this yourself because you know the space then there is software like this, or Wealth Simple for example.
So if I have an extra $5 I can manage that "Wealth".
You don't get wealthy by giving someone else 1% of AUM for performing on-par with a passive investment in index funds you could self-manage. So, sure, this is "wanna be wealthy", but what even is "wealthy"? I have a plan using spreadsheets and other tools that is on track to take me into low-mid double digit millions prior to retirement, I can't imagine giving someone 1%, which can be six-figures or more, every year for clicking some buttons. At some point managing my own wealth is worth more investment of my time than any other occupation.
This is how advisors are typically paid, but this isn't all that they do. Empirically, as people make more money, they turn more to advisors and away from self-directed or robo apps.
Lots of people have opined on why, if you follow the trade publications for advisors. To me, the reasoning comes down to risk: if you have a lot at stake then you will pay money for a lawyer to review for $$$$ per hour. If you have a lot of money you will pay 1% if you can feel more comfortable that the advisor is handling all the aspects of it and you can sleep better at night.
I don't trust industries that use ignorance to line their pockets, which is why I manage my own wealth.
So you're more wealthy then the person working 2 jobs, living with 3 roommates, commuting by public transit.
Wealth is just your possessions with value.
This is just being "pedantic about social class".
The term "Wealth" is just a word for money.
Pedantically, any money can be termed "Wealth".
So if I have an extra $5 dollars, I can manage that "Wealth", and I should not get hung up on a term that the ignorant masses associate with a "Social Class".
There are no social hierarchies, we are all wealthy on a sliding scale, from 5$ to $5MIL to $50BIL.
Build a tool that allows people to organize their 5 spreadsheet and you win.
1. Overview spreadsheet that shows my current net worth (fed from my other spreadsheets), a monthly snapshot of spending, income, and assets, and number of months until FIRE based on my trailing 12 month spend and income.
2. Spreadsheet tracking stocks I own + their current value
3. Spreadsheet tracking my crypto transactions (that I run a script against to get the cost basis and current value to plug into spreasheet 1)
4. Lunchmoney.app - website that I use to track and categorize spend. This data fees into my overview spreadsheet.
wealth can take many forms including human capital, social capital, future earning power, you can be wealthy in some way and yet cash-poor
- one of the apparently ignorant masses
I don't think it is surprising that the word "wealth" is used by a lot of people in different ways.
I was accused of using the word incorrectly as in "Wealth" means only "Rich" people. I was wrong because a lot of "non-Rich" can also manage their "Wealth". Someone in the comments even considered having 5Mil of assets to be NOT Rich, NOT wealthy.
It seemed like in the comments there was push back that just because they are managing their "Wealth" that they are NOT Wealthy, and so don't lump them into that category.
Instead of "Wealth" meaning, long list of asset types.
I think maybe that is the point. If you have enough 'assets' and free time to ponder the concept of "wealth" as units of exchange and the nature of money and future earning power, then you are probably "Rich" to many people.
So if you are needing a software tool to manage your "Wealth" then you probably have more "Money/Assets/Fungible Stuff" than most, like >5% of worlds population, so you could be considered "Rich". Then because you are "Rich", "Wealthy", "Have lot of Money", yes, you can be grouped with "Rich" and people can have opinions on the group of "Rich" people.
So I think it is ok to assume if someone needs tools to manage their "Wealth", that I can assume they are "Wealthy".
I talked with small financial advisory firms (1-3 advisors) to see if there were some backend tools to help them with client work. There's some initial data gathering and entry, but the value is the coaching and psychology rather than the hard numbers.
I tried Titan a while back and found that less compelling as a "hedge fund / active management roboadvisor". It didn't seem to differentiate sufficiently from the passive roboadvisors or what traditional wealth management could offer.
The original comment says that no-one is using apps...what do you think wealth managers use? Wealth managers are usually the same products that are re-skinned for professional use with a few added features that most advisors should know how to do themselves...but usually don't (I worked for someone managing nine figures who didn't understand that you could use Excel to do calculations, so he would sit there with a calculator and hardcode every number...this man is worth $10m+ himself).
If you have the ability, I appreciate that some people have neither the time or inclination, do it yourself. At medium levels of wealth (more than $1m and under $50m), you are likely unable to access good advice so this is really the sweet spot for doing it yourself (if you prefer simple financial products, financial advice largely exists as a service in this bracket because people choose to invest in extremely complex products that are designed to give financial advisors something to charge money for...if you have a DC pension and are investing in ETFs, 99% of financial advisors cannot do anything for you).
What the actual f...
According to the "Global Wealth Databook 2021" by Credit Suisse, page 129, there are in the US:
- $1-5M : 19.5M people (<6%)
- $5-10M : 3.2M people (<1%)
- $10-50M : 1.5M people (0.4%)
And that is from one of the richest country in the world, with a very steep exponential wealth distribution.
$1-50M is _far_ from "medium wealth" by any stretch of the imagination.
>$1M (liquid) is enough to be denoted "high net worth" HNW and access private banking, with a dedicated wealth manager, from most major investment banks.
There are 2 ways to interpret "at medium levels of wealth":
* A medium amount of money among the general population. This is the interpetation you're thinking of.
* A medium amount of money among wealthy people. So wealthy might mean $500k+, with the low end of wealthy meaning $500k-1M, and medium level of wealthy meaning $1M-5M. Below wealthy would be middle class. This may be the interpretation skippyboxedhero was thinking of.
Regulatory costs are very high, this means insurance costs are high, etc. Marketing costs are extremely high in financial services too. If you are going mass market, you are paying hundreds of dollars for leads...how do you make that work if you can't charge much and need to acquire your whole customer base every week?
This is why most of the market is underserved, why rich people end up owning all the high-yield assets, and why the only real solution is having very large institutional pools of capital for most retail savings (i.e. like Australia's superannuation funds, which produced a level of wealth for the average consumer vastly in excess of the US with lower levels of GDP per capita, relatively poor penetration of financial markets, etc.).
Financial literacy doesn't seem optional for the wealthy from my perspective. There's too much to gain by having it and too much to lose by neglecting it.
1. I hate giving my data to a third party
2. There always ends up being some limitation that forces me to exclude part of my assets, doesn't let me handle something the way I wish, etc
I never liked the big heavy ones with all the bells/whistle integrations that want your password so they can log directly into your financial accounts. And the integration would always break, causing my net worth to swing by double digit percentage points. I ended up spending more time nursing the integration than actually watching my net worth.
This is a bit simplistic. It’s more focused on setting a target return and cash flows consistent with your current life plans. Whether this is a defensive or more aggressive position is really up to you and your goals. But Wealth managers are about putting an investment strategy in place to achieve that. They also help actively manage your portfolio to address macroeconomic trends.
This is just me, but if I had legal work and deep pockets, I'd hire a lawyer.
>a majority of people think that when it comes to finance they can compete on an equal level with experts who do this every day
>But if your skilled you surely save a ton of fees.
If you are "focused on wealth preservation" rather than "generating high returns", what is the need for skill?
If I won the lottery, and I just sent, say, a $500M check to a regular discount broker and bought an index fund, is someone going to take it away from me? Are the wealth management divisions of every podunk bank and credit union there for a reason? Would I need to hire "protection"?
Warren Buffett famously said he "upon his passing, has directed the trustee for his wife’s benefit to “put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund.”
And Barack Obama reportedly put all his assets in government bonds when he became President to avoid conflicts of interest.
Obviously not everyone takes this sort of simple approach, but some famous examples seem to prove it's possible.
[1] https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-guide//chapter_inv...
[2] https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-guide//rpt_standar...
Yes, Ledger can do all those things. No, it doesn't do this "out of the box".
I do most of these things. Simple, by adding meta-tags to my ledger. I'm just now working on consolidating on all my willy-nilly scripts and tools. And then plan to turn this into an actual "investment dashboard" ala ghostfolio but using the ledger as source.
In the end, a plain-text-ledger is just a of database. And the ledger query language (e.g. bean-query-language) a way to query it and produce reports.
So, what you are asking is more like "can SQLite categorize assets, give a breakdown of the exposure according to such cats per industry, region etc". Well, sure it can. But it's a bit of a strange question.
https://github.com/berkes/bullboard-rs https://github.com/berkes/tabula
Again: early. But tabula is my consolidation of random "beancount/ledger" stuff regarding running my small business and startup. And bullboard my consolidation of random "beancount/ledger" stuff regarding everything investment related. The latter is just a CLI tool for now, and barely works. But once the businesslogic is done, I plan to add a web-interface alike ghostfolio to it. A tad simpler, I think, though.
Is this able to plot different Roth + 401k strategies to maximize tax advantages and returns? Also figuring in your small business activity and write-offs? Big picture.
I've been watching YouTube videos explaining various strategies and ways to bank yourself. Totally pissed me off that no one told me all of this before. My lack of knowledge has really hosed my finances bad and I was the person that would help coworkers figure all this stuff out. I found a lot of people just leaving their money in money market funds in their matched 401 and they were very apprehensive about doing anything. Even saw a trained broker do this.
People are leaving a lot of wealth on the table because they don't know the laws and how they can get rich moving their money around and they will not go to advisors for various reasons,again, mostly out of ignorance. I hear advisors often don't know these laws or fail to tell people.
I had no idea you could get a solo 401k and completely self-direct the investments (I.e put the money into your business or a friends). Searched Fidelity and was able to dig up the PDF forms.
I always thought it was evil to borrow from your 401k,and indeed every document you find on this throws up scary words and harsh language and intermixes the topic with withdrawals. Powerful source of funds that people avoid out of fear and ignorance.
I'm not concerned with watching balances but would like something that can present scenarios for various vehicles and suggest different courses of action.
I want to start a small business, what is the best way for me to fund that without risking to much or getting hosed on taxes...
- It’s counterintuitive, but during your saving years you’re better off if the market’s doing poorly because everything’s on sale. If you’re retired you want the opposite.
- Frequently looking at your net worth is a big distraction. Just focus on the things you can control, like your savings rate and expenses.
PP is easier to set up though, it's a plain old Java desktop application.
https://www.portfolio-performance.info/en/
Edit: it works well for crypto too, you can track anything that has a count and a price.
I’ve been exploring such projects off late myself. I found https://github.com/ananthakumaran/paisa to be a really clean and well implemented project on similar lines. It already handles a bunch of asset classes familiar to the country I’m residing in which is tempting me to give it a shot sometime soon!
I’m probably a minority but I don’t micromanage my wealth. General account level information is good enough. I also do not trust wealth managers, usually their advice is terrible. Schwab automatically assigns a person on your account after a certain wealth threshold. They call me occasionally to make sure I’m aware of the risks which of course I am.
The amount of websites that don’t support control+click indicate to me that most people don’t use the method.
Edit: but regardless it’s not okay to hijack the back button.
Though I haven't yet seen a part of this tool that makes projections. Did I miss that?
All I need to do is keep track of whatever I transfer to my broker and number of securities purchased for each type of security.
Works well enough for an investor. Does not work well enough for a gambler (day trader) :p
it's not open-source (yet) but we're giving you all the data of connected portfolios and bank accounts via api and it's free if you just want the data. Also we are investing a lot of time in asset matching and market data (even options are supported), something all the other tools we've tried fell short of (especially global stocks and multi currency accounts).
When you say "(yet)", are you referring just to the API code or everything? Because I'd love to use this if I could host it myself.
I’d love to open source the dashboard first as it is probably useful to self-host and just feed with your own data. Let me know if you have any questions.
JavaScript packages are one of the fastest routing rotting set of dependencies.
I'll wait for the teaser
On the other hand you have some onlyfans girls flashing their ass for 10 seconds getting thousands or even millions.
I just don't get this sentiment. Nothing lets me model free-form questions as quickly, easily and effectively as opening up Excel. I get there are better tools for specialized or defined problems, but the spreadsheet is still my go-to general purpose tool.
Edit: took me a while to find it, but the last similar too I tried was https://projectionlab.com/, and while paid, it's UX is way better.
I love projects like these exists, but not being able to download the data automatically from my accounts was a dealbreaker for projects like GNUCash.
Is it "a thing" that you post your stuff in Reddit, Dev.to, and a random "Awesome" repo on GitHub and then use that as "social proof"?
"Seems legit." - Some guy on Yelp
Basically "bullboard" will be "yet another portfolio tracker/manager". Like so many out there (Ghostfolio, PortfolioDividendTracker etc), nothing new.
The only difference is that the source is your (existing) ledger/beancount file.
To be clear: it currently is a CLI application, but the goal is for it to be a web tool. Also selfhostable.
https://github.com/redstreet/fava_investor already exists in this space and is very similar: it's what I currently use. I don't like it, though. I dislike python for bookkeeping software and complex domain modelling. I dislike the UX of fava. And I prefer opinionated, focused software: call a spade a spade. Not "Assets", "Income" or "Transactions" but Stocks, ETFs, Bonds, Dividend, Sells, Buys etc.
If it’s actually free it may actually be helpful to add a prominent Pricing in the nav, where you explain why it’s free, how you make money (or how you might plan to), and whether there are any catches, like selling all the data to someone (not that you’d likely do that, but if I stumbled upon the site from anywhere else, I might assume a catch exists)
Anyway what I can see of this looks really professional, so nice job! I’m curious to try it!
Thus I suspect there's space for more specialized solutions like Ghostfolio. Although I myself would prefer if my accounting system could also do these things. (I'd be interested in these willy-nilly scripts. I also enjoy writing willy-nilly scripts, but time is limited)
EDIT: saw the link you already posted
Au contraire: I'm building my business around that exact problem: that ledger is potentially good at doing anything, but doesn't do it out of the box.
Even then, though, advisors are biased to recommend things that they can actually do for you, so sometimes they will recommend things that are easier for them ("just use the same portfolio as my other clients") instead of finding what's truly optimal for you.
And that's actually usually okay. The kind of person who never touches their investments and doesn't understand finance is actually better off with an advisor than doing literally nothing -- e.g. sitting in cash, or really dumb investments your aunt recommended -- which is the practically the counterfactual a lot of the time
I read somewhere (but didn't do my own research) Schwab's business model these days, maybe others, is making money off idle customer cash, now that they don't charge trading commissions. They may not want customers to buy anything.
With interest rates up so much, I would guess it is even more lucrative?
Not from you, but the IRS will take 40% of everything when you die.* Only 60%, at best, goes to your heirs depending on state law. Unless you proactively plan.
* Yes, yes the $13M federal exemption but that's a rounding error at the $500M+returns scale.
Cry me a river.
No more aristocracies.
The market might take it away from you. Last year the S&P returned -20% - there goes $100M!
This is always a scam. Madoff died in prison, you know.