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Ghostfolio: Open-source wealth management software

456 points by falkaer 3y ago

quaintdev 3y ago
Repo: https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY6ObSQVJZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY6ObSQVJZk
- guideamigo_com 3y ago
  Typescript tells me that it will start to break soon if it ever gets abandoned. JavaScript packages are one of the fastest routing rotting set of dependencies.
  - 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
    I wanted to dispute this but then I remembered that I wasted 2 hours yesterday because Yarn 3 PnP and Typescript weren't playing nice together.
    - cryptoboid 3y ago
      I feel that pain, I've gone through that but I've just switched to Yarn 1 and call it a day
      - erhaetherth 3y ago
        Yeah... I kept it on Yarn 3/berry but set the node-linker back to node_modules and moved on with my life.
- zo1 3y ago
  Not really a trailer. More like a marketing placeholder video with moving screenshots.
- 3abiton 3y ago
  > trailer I'll wait for the teaser
screamingninja 3y ago
Does anyone have experience with self-hosting this? Curious to learn what worked and what did not.
- c0brac0bra 3y ago
  I just tried and it came up fine. Onboarding is non-existent so that's unfortunate. Edit: took me a while to find it, but the last similar too I tried was https://projectionlab.com/ https://projectionlab.com/, and while paid, it's UX is way better.
- counterpartyrsk 3y ago
  I tried it a couple months ago and wasn't too impressed. Unless I missed the feature, I trade enough to need something that can plug in to my brokerage accounts. There is a trade import feature, but I'm not going to export/import transactions from multiple accounts daily.
  - madballster 3y ago
    Have you found a better alternative for someone who trades a lot? I'd like to drill down into trade results per symbol and get ROI statistics and visualize past buy/sell points.
LilBytes 3y ago
Hug of death? Unable to load the site.
JSavageOne 3y ago
Site not loading for me
- Ocha 3y ago
  Same
- faitswulff 3y ago
  It accurately reflects my wealth management needs
  - wing-_-nuts 3y ago
    404 wealth not found?
- throw0101a 3y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20230823004121/https://ghostfol.io/en/start https://web.archive.org/web/20230823004121/https://ghostfol....
- jasonjmcghee 3y ago
  Seems to load very slowly. Maybe not serving statically from a CDN
czbond 3y ago
Thanks for posting - looks like something I've wanted to find for a while
otoburb 3y ago
The GitHub link is: https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio 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.
- jollyjerry 3y ago
  Curious to hear what you're looking for from a wealth management product. 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 https://jch.app The people I've talked to who use spreadsheets do it because it's fun.
  - mushufasa 3y ago
    Yes I've done a lot of customer discovery interviews in this space, and what resonates is a quote: "People like spending their money, not spending time with it." 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.
    - jollyjerry 3y ago
      Ya the people I talked to that enjoyed tinkering were FIRE enthusiasts or bogleheads. But that felt more like entertainment and community rather than looking for a solution to a specific problem. 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.
mr-karan 3y ago
Looks nice. The comparison with S&P500/similar Index funds is an important metric to track. I’d also built a tool https://monkeybeat.market/ https://monkeybeat.market/ which demonstrates a similar concept. I’ve been exploring such projects off late myself. I found https://github.com/ananthakumaran/paisa 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!
- jollyjerry 3y ago
  I like focusing on DIY-ers and having the web UI for visualizations. Makes sense that someone who would take the time to set things up would want increased flexibility over a spreadsheet.
xur17 3y ago
Very neat, excited to take a look, and especially excited that it is self hostable / open source. I've tried a number of services like this, and always end up back on a spreadsheet because: 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
- matthewtse 3y ago
  Yes same! I've always wanted some "simpler" net worth tracker, still on a spreadsheet at this point. 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.
  - reidjs 3y ago
    Have you dabbled with plain text accounting systems at all? They seem like the next step after spreadsheets because ease of version control and pipelines to/from.
  - jollyjerry 3y ago
    I expanded my spreadsheet into a webapp https://jch.app https://jch.app. My original thinking was to avoid broken bank syncing, but one problem I still have is how to include assets that aren't publicly listed. For example, have funds in a retirement account that's specific to that institution and can't fetch updated prices. Currently getting around that by using a similar target date fund as a proxy for the price.
    - xp84 3y ago
      Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what’s the pricing on that? When I see “sign up for free” I’m trained to expect a hidden, costly upsell. 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!
reedf1 3y ago
What is the market data source (is there one?)
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Isn't "wealth" a misnomer. 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.
- breakds 3y ago
  There are quite some wealthy people who happens to understand technology well and use and contribute to many open source tools.
- xur17 3y ago
  What do you define as wealthy? If you read bogleheads / fire blogs, there are plenty of people I would define as wealthy that self manage their assets. A lot of them use spreadsheets, some use free / cheap software online.
  - toolz 3y ago
    Everyone in my family with a net worth over 5MM self-manages their assets. Many financial advisors/managers are percentage based commission which ends up being about as close to a scam as you can get without it being unethical. (very much just my own opinion here) I don't trust industries that use ignorance to line their pockets, which is why I manage my own wealth.
    - skippyboxedhero 3y ago
      Worked in wealth management (and am now building something similar to the OP but from a totally different direction), it is a complete scam. 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).
halotrope 3y ago
Ghostfolio is awesome! Sorry for the plug, we are doing something similar with markets.sh 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).
- xcdzvyn 3y ago
  I much much prefer markets.sh' UI to Ghostfolio's, honestly. I'd even call it particularly good. Looks like Tailwind, right? 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.
  - halotrope 3y ago
    Thank you so much! Yeah, right now we keep the API as open as possible, we’re big fans of oss but it’s gonna take a while as the system runs on many databases and systems. Apart from the simple portfolio tracking, we are ingesting live data from global stocks, thousands of news per day and do clustering and machine learning and all kinds of fancy things on it. 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.
wing-_-nuts 3y ago
Call me old fashioned but I just add everything under 'other accounts' on vanguard, and call it a day. It's close enough for my taste. I imagine other brokerages offer this feature too and vanguard has pretty much the worst reputation for ux out there.
- systemvoltage 3y ago
  Yeah, Schwab can track other accounts from Fidelity, Vanguard, etc. 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.
  - mritchie712 3y ago
    Their advice isn't necessarily terrible, it's just strongly biased towards them making a buck off you.
    - mushufasa 3y ago
      It used to be standard for advisors to make money on commission, which led to terrible incentives (read: they are paid to get you into particular investments, which is an incentive to recommend things that make them money even if they are bad for you). This practice is declining, but you still find it at the big banks and brokers. "Fee only" advisors means they only take a fee from you, so they don't have this conflict of interest -- you can find many at Napfa.org . 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
ra7 3y ago
How does this compare to Beancount + Fava?
- mcshicks 3y ago
  I very much wondered the same thing. I've had a couple of occasions where I really wanted a numerical answer to some finance questions, like for instance keeping an IRA vs paying taxes and converting to Roth. And I want it to take into account my tax burden, how much cash I have available, etc. The simplest way for me to do it was python scripts and Beancount + Fava. I don't even try and use it for keeping track of my finances, I use quicken for the simple reason that I know my spouse can use it as well. I didn't see "tax planning" on the features for Ghostfolio, this seems so very basic to me that I couldn't consider using it. I understand why in a way, there are so many situations. Of course if I only have to model my particular situation it's much simpler to just write a simple model in python.
FrameworkFred 3y ago
Neat idea, but I don't see a great way to handle real estate, unless it's shoe-horned awkwardly into wealth items. For me, that's a gotta-have.
rsstack 3y ago
> saying no to spreadsheets in 2023 Normalize spreadsheets as evergreen technology. Say no to weeb3 in 2023.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
andix 3y ago
I am using Portfolio Performance for a while now. Need to check how it compares. PP is easier to set up though, it's a plain old Java desktop application. https://www.portfolio-performance.info/en/ https://www.portfolio-performance.info/en/ Edit: it works well for crypto too, you can track anything that has a count and a price.
- Aulig 3y ago
  I use that too. Ghostfolio looks a lot more beautiful but probably is more limited in terms of features :)
- figmert 3y ago
  [dead]
- matanrubin 3y ago
  I found Portfolio Performance to be non-intuitive and very hard to use
  - andix 3y ago
    That's true. UX is not the best. But it has a lot of features and works reasonably well once you got used to it.
ak39 3y ago
Does it handle stock splits, consolidations, dividends etc? Calculating returns (basically tracking growth) is a non-trivial problem.
- berkes 3y ago
  Yes, somewhat. Not as proper as it should. But it does the job. Esp with such events as splits, mergers, renames you can see it's not a very professional setup. I've had to hack around it by adding and then nulling some assets like "emission claims". Or, in my country, dividend-tax is extracted immediately so I now hack around that by adding that tax as "fee" to ghostfolio. It works. But isn't a replacement for actual book- and portfolio-keeping.
  - matanrubin 3y ago
    How did you handle stock splits?
    - berkes 3y ago
      A manual action where I multiply and divide all actions. It works, bit hardly. Won't do it again. A next time, I'll probably try to do a sell all old stocks for X/stock, and then buy all for X/splitamt/stock to handle this. https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio/discussions/1072 https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio/discussions/1072
      - matanrubin 3y ago
        I think there's a python package for Ghostfolio, I assume we can automate this process
darau1 3y ago
Anybody care to define "wealth management" as opposed to run-of-the-mill personal accounting? Why would I use this instead of ledger[1], for example? - [1]: https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html
- tr3ntg 3y ago
  If you're using a tool like ledger, I don't think there's much ghostfolio could say to convert you. Seems like comparing apples to oranges. I'm not familiar with ledger, but at a glance, seems like it's made for a different audience with different needs.
  - berkes 3y ago
    In fact, I'm working on something alike Ghostfolio but that uses ledger as database. It's very much early stage and mostly proof of concept and hacked together scripts. But I'm moving it to both "tabula" and "bullboard": https://github.com/berkes/bullboard-rs https://github.com/berkes/bullboard-rs https://github.com/berkes/tabula 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.
    - darau1 3y ago
      That's interesting. So, if I understand this thread at all, your projects may help me to "preserve" my "wealth", with ledger?
      - berkes 3y ago
        It won't "preserve" it: if you sell or buy at the wrong time and place, it won't prevent you. It's basically a way to visualize your portfolio: hows it doing, what are your allocations, how well are you keeping your strategy? do you need to rebalance? 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 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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ochoseis 3y ago
Two things I’ve learned after 15 years of working starting during the GFC: - 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.
asutekku 3y ago
It's a tool which 100% benefits from having a good UX, so not having a single screenshot on the frontpage is not a good sign. I don't count the linked YouTube video as one as it redirects me to YouTube.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
marcopicentini 3y ago
What tool did you use to crete the promo video?
evergre 3y ago
For anyone who needs a hosted/paid/slick alternative, there is https://kubera.com https://kubera.com Disclosure - I work at Kubera.
- alexchamberlain 3y ago
  Ghostfol.io have a hosted/paid option for 19 USD/year. Is Kubera worth the extra $100+?
  - evergre 3y ago
    Please take the 14-day and find out for yourself.
- sgarman 3y ago
  How successful has the [COMPETITOR] vs Kubera pages in footer technique been for y'all?
scubakid 3y ago
I'm flattered to see they have a page advertising it as an alternative to ProjectionLab (disclosure: I made that). Though I haven't yet seen a part of this tool that makes projections. Did I miss that?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
datavirtue 3y ago
Had trouble hitting back on the browser. Major peave. 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...
iFire 3y ago
LICENSE GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio/blob/main/LICENSE
spaceribs 3y ago
Cool! an open source Angular app!
nomdep 3y ago
Fantastic! Now all what I need is to have wealth to manage
ghostpepper 3y ago
Maybe I'm just getting old but it always makes me skeptical when something is introduced as "Open Source" and then the main landing page includes a pricing tab.
- basch 3y ago
  Is there a lot of free cloud hosted open source software as a service that isnt ad supported?
- mirzap 3y ago
  What's wrong with paying for the software? You get the source code, they provide you the service if you don't want to handle it by your self.
  - xcdzvyn 3y ago
    I think GP means seeing a pricing section without any extra details suggests the open-source version is limited in some way, with certain features paywalled. That's how I see it.
- andersrs 3y ago
  People are cheapskates when it comes to OSS. OP put in thousands of commits and only has 18 supporters. They are not exactly a software baron are they? On the other hand you have some onlyfans girls flashing their ass for 10 seconds getting thousands or even millions.
- BLKNSLVR 3y ago
  I was initially too, but upon reading said Pricing page was pleasantly surprised.
mcgeez 3y ago
Does this retrieve data from your accounts? If so, what does it use to do that? Plaid? 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.
- MezzoDelCammin 3y ago
  And have You managed do somehow automatize it in the end?
k__ 3y ago
lol, 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
LoveMortuus 3y ago
Why did the site hijack the back button? I tried to return to HN but it just kept reloading into the ghostfol.io site...
- wintermutestwin 3y ago
  I am always baffled by people who actually use the back and forward buttons. I guess I just assume that everyone opens links by right-clicking and opening in a new tab. Is there some reason why back and forward is a better or even useful option?
  - hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
    Mobile devices, for one. 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.
  - optymizer 3y ago
    You cannot possibly be serious. Who uses back buttons, on the web? Everybody.
  - cwalv 3y ago
    I hit the same problem as gp, on mobile, tho I did open in a new tab (hold+open in new tab). The back button is usually a quick swipe from right to get me back to what I was reading.
  - FractalHQ 3y ago
    Cmd+click! Right clicking to open a link in a new tab is uncivilized.
stevofolife 3y ago
Can someone not just make a wealth management spreadsheet in Excel? If anyone has a good one, can you share or sell to me?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- nereus 3y ago
  Is this the sort of thing you are after? https://cspersonalfinance.io https://cspersonalfinance.io
  - redact207 3y ago
    This is so good. I've tried so many homebaked spreadsheet trackers and semi-complete side project sites. This one looks like it strikes a good balance between feature completeness and simplicity
skeeter2020 3y ago
"saying no to spreadsheets in 2023" 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.
- tonfreed 3y ago
  The first 6 years of my career was working on data heavy applications. The statisticians on staff all used Excel to prototype their models. It's a great tool
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
  Petulant NIH syndrome.
- dagw 3y ago
  Agreed. I have a degree in statistics, years of experience working with data analysis, closer 15 years working with python, know R etc. etc. But if I just want to quickly play around with some numbers to get a quick feel for a problem I almost always still fire up Excel first.
jmprspret 3y ago
I never understand how these kinds of software do data importing. Do you have to manually import these things every time I do a trade or I get my paycheck or spend $2 at the corner shop? If so that seems annoying
- esprehn 3y ago
  There's bank data aggregators like Yodlee. If the app uses that it can auto import transactions. Ghostfolio seems to be oriented around manual import though (export csv from your bank and import yourself periodically).
- gh02t 3y ago
  I use Firefly III (which isn't quite the same but similar issue) and import csv exports from my bank and other accounts. I have to jump through some hoops with Selenium to automate downloading the csv files but it works mostly reliably after some fiddling.
- bboygravity 3y ago
  I just use a spreadsheet in Libre Calc that scrapes prices of securities (almost) live from public sources using an extension. 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
vekker 3y ago
Very nice! Awesome tech stack too; a welcome change from all the React/Next.js projects these days.

456 points by falkaer 3y ago

Repo: https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY6ObSQVJZk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY6ObSQVJZk

guideamigo_com 3y ago
Typescript tells me that it will start to break soon if it ever gets abandoned. JavaScript packages are one of the fastest routing rotting set of dependencies.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
  I wanted to dispute this but then I remembered that I wasted 2 hours yesterday because Yarn 3 PnP and Typescript weren't playing nice together.
  - cryptoboid 3y ago
    I feel that pain, I've gone through that but I've just switched to Yarn 1 and call it a day
    - erhaetherth 3y ago
      Yeah... I kept it on Yarn 3/berry but set the node-linker back to node_modules and moved on with my life.
zo1 3y ago
Not really a trailer. More like a marketing placeholder video with moving screenshots.
3abiton 3y ago
> trailer I'll wait for the teaser

screamingninja 3y ago

Does anyone have experience with self-hosting this? Curious to learn what worked and what did not.

c0brac0bra 3y ago
I just tried and it came up fine. Onboarding is non-existent so that's unfortunate. Edit: took me a while to find it, but the last similar too I tried was https://projectionlab.com/ https://projectionlab.com/, and while paid, it's UX is way better.
counterpartyrsk 3y ago
I tried it a couple months ago and wasn't too impressed. Unless I missed the feature, I trade enough to need something that can plug in to my brokerage accounts. There is a trade import feature, but I'm not going to export/import transactions from multiple accounts daily.
- madballster 3y ago
  Have you found a better alternative for someone who trades a lot? I'd like to drill down into trade results per symbol and get ROI statistics and visualize past buy/sell points.

LilBytes 3y ago

Hug of death? Unable to load the site.

JSavageOne 3y ago

Site not loading for me

Ocha 3y ago
Same
faitswulff 3y ago
It accurately reflects my wealth management needs
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  404 wealth not found?
throw0101a 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230823004121/https://ghostfol.io/en/start https://web.archive.org/web/20230823004121/https://ghostfol....
jasonjmcghee 3y ago
Seems to load very slowly. Maybe not serving statically from a CDN

czbond 3y ago

Thanks for posting - looks like something I've wanted to find for a while

otoburb 3y ago

The GitHub link is: https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio 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.

jollyjerry 3y ago
Curious to hear what you're looking for from a wealth management product. 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 https://jch.app The people I've talked to who use spreadsheets do it because it's fun.
- mushufasa 3y ago
  Yes I've done a lot of customer discovery interviews in this space, and what resonates is a quote: "People like spending their money, not spending time with it." 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.
  - jollyjerry 3y ago
    Ya the people I talked to that enjoyed tinkering were FIRE enthusiasts or bogleheads. But that felt more like entertainment and community rather than looking for a solution to a specific problem. 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.

mr-karan 3y ago

Looks nice. The comparison with S&P500/similar Index funds is an important metric to track. I’d also built a tool https://monkeybeat.market/ https://monkeybeat.market/ which demonstrates a similar concept. I’ve been exploring such projects off late myself. I found https://github.com/ananthakumaran/paisa 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!

jollyjerry 3y ago
I like focusing on DIY-ers and having the web UI for visualizations. Makes sense that someone who would take the time to set things up would want increased flexibility over a spreadsheet.

xur17 3y ago

Very neat, excited to take a look, and especially excited that it is self hostable / open source. I've tried a number of services like this, and always end up back on a spreadsheet because: 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

matthewtse 3y ago
Yes same! I've always wanted some "simpler" net worth tracker, still on a spreadsheet at this point. 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.
- reidjs 3y ago
  Have you dabbled with plain text accounting systems at all? They seem like the next step after spreadsheets because ease of version control and pipelines to/from.
- jollyjerry 3y ago
  I expanded my spreadsheet into a webapp https://jch.app https://jch.app. My original thinking was to avoid broken bank syncing, but one problem I still have is how to include assets that aren't publicly listed. For example, have funds in a retirement account that's specific to that institution and can't fetch updated prices. Currently getting around that by using a similar target date fund as a proxy for the price.
  - xp84 3y ago
    Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what’s the pricing on that? When I see “sign up for free” I’m trained to expect a hidden, costly upsell. 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!

reedf1 3y ago

What is the market data source (is there one?)

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

Isn't "wealth" a misnomer. 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.

breakds 3y ago
There are quite some wealthy people who happens to understand technology well and use and contribute to many open source tools.
xur17 3y ago
What do you define as wealthy? If you read bogleheads / fire blogs, there are plenty of people I would define as wealthy that self manage their assets. A lot of them use spreadsheets, some use free / cheap software online.
- toolz 3y ago
  Everyone in my family with a net worth over 5MM self-manages their assets. Many financial advisors/managers are percentage based commission which ends up being about as close to a scam as you can get without it being unethical. (very much just my own opinion here) I don't trust industries that use ignorance to line their pockets, which is why I manage my own wealth.
  - skippyboxedhero 3y ago
    Worked in wealth management (and am now building something similar to the OP but from a totally different direction), it is a complete scam. 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).

halotrope 3y ago

Ghostfolio is awesome! Sorry for the plug, we are doing something similar with markets.sh 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).

xcdzvyn 3y ago
I much much prefer markets.sh' UI to Ghostfolio's, honestly. I'd even call it particularly good. Looks like Tailwind, right? 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.
- halotrope 3y ago
  Thank you so much! Yeah, right now we keep the API as open as possible, we’re big fans of oss but it’s gonna take a while as the system runs on many databases and systems. Apart from the simple portfolio tracking, we are ingesting live data from global stocks, thousands of news per day and do clustering and machine learning and all kinds of fancy things on it. 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.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago

Call me old fashioned but I just add everything under 'other accounts' on vanguard, and call it a day. It's close enough for my taste. I imagine other brokerages offer this feature too and vanguard has pretty much the worst reputation for ux out there.

systemvoltage 3y ago
Yeah, Schwab can track other accounts from Fidelity, Vanguard, etc. 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.
- mritchie712 3y ago
  Their advice isn't necessarily terrible, it's just strongly biased towards them making a buck off you.
  - mushufasa 3y ago
    It used to be standard for advisors to make money on commission, which led to terrible incentives (read: they are paid to get you into particular investments, which is an incentive to recommend things that make them money even if they are bad for you). This practice is declining, but you still find it at the big banks and brokers. "Fee only" advisors means they only take a fee from you, so they don't have this conflict of interest -- you can find many at Napfa.org . 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

ra7 3y ago

How does this compare to Beancount + Fava?

mcshicks 3y ago
I very much wondered the same thing. I've had a couple of occasions where I really wanted a numerical answer to some finance questions, like for instance keeping an IRA vs paying taxes and converting to Roth. And I want it to take into account my tax burden, how much cash I have available, etc. The simplest way for me to do it was python scripts and Beancount + Fava. I don't even try and use it for keeping track of my finances, I use quicken for the simple reason that I know my spouse can use it as well. I didn't see "tax planning" on the features for Ghostfolio, this seems so very basic to me that I couldn't consider using it. I understand why in a way, there are so many situations. Of course if I only have to model my particular situation it's much simpler to just write a simple model in python.

FrameworkFred 3y ago

Neat idea, but I don't see a great way to handle real estate, unless it's shoe-horned awkwardly into wealth items. For me, that's a gotta-have.

rsstack 3y ago

> saying no to spreadsheets in 2023 Normalize spreadsheets as evergreen technology. Say no to weeb3 in 2023.

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andix 3y ago

I am using Portfolio Performance for a while now. Need to check how it compares. PP is easier to set up though, it's a plain old Java desktop application. https://www.portfolio-performance.info/en/ https://www.portfolio-performance.info/en/ Edit: it works well for crypto too, you can track anything that has a count and a price.

Aulig 3y ago
I use that too. Ghostfolio looks a lot more beautiful but probably is more limited in terms of features :)
figmert 3y ago
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matanrubin 3y ago
I found Portfolio Performance to be non-intuitive and very hard to use
- andix 3y ago
  That's true. UX is not the best. But it has a lot of features and works reasonably well once you got used to it.

ak39 3y ago

Does it handle stock splits, consolidations, dividends etc? Calculating returns (basically tracking growth) is a non-trivial problem.

berkes 3y ago
Yes, somewhat. Not as proper as it should. But it does the job. Esp with such events as splits, mergers, renames you can see it's not a very professional setup. I've had to hack around it by adding and then nulling some assets like "emission claims". Or, in my country, dividend-tax is extracted immediately so I now hack around that by adding that tax as "fee" to ghostfolio. It works. But isn't a replacement for actual book- and portfolio-keeping.
- matanrubin 3y ago
  How did you handle stock splits?
  - berkes 3y ago
    A manual action where I multiply and divide all actions. It works, bit hardly. Won't do it again. A next time, I'll probably try to do a sell all old stocks for X/stock, and then buy all for X/splitamt/stock to handle this. https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio/discussions/1072 https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio/discussions/1072
    - matanrubin 3y ago
      I think there's a python package for Ghostfolio, I assume we can automate this process

darau1 3y ago

Anybody care to define "wealth management" as opposed to run-of-the-mill personal accounting? Why would I use this instead of ledger[1], for example? - [1]: https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html https://ledger-cli.org/doc/ledger3.html

tr3ntg 3y ago
If you're using a tool like ledger, I don't think there's much ghostfolio could say to convert you. Seems like comparing apples to oranges. I'm not familiar with ledger, but at a glance, seems like it's made for a different audience with different needs.
- berkes 3y ago
  In fact, I'm working on something alike Ghostfolio but that uses ledger as database. It's very much early stage and mostly proof of concept and hacked together scripts. But I'm moving it to both "tabula" and "bullboard": https://github.com/berkes/bullboard-rs https://github.com/berkes/bullboard-rs https://github.com/berkes/tabula 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.
  - darau1 3y ago
    That's interesting. So, if I understand this thread at all, your projects may help me to "preserve" my "wealth", with ledger?
    - berkes 3y ago
      It won't "preserve" it: if you sell or buy at the wrong time and place, it won't prevent you. It's basically a way to visualize your portfolio: hows it doing, what are your allocations, how well are you keeping your strategy? do you need to rebalance? 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 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.

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ochoseis 3y ago

Two things I’ve learned after 15 years of working starting during the GFC: - 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.

asutekku 3y ago

It's a tool which 100% benefits from having a good UX, so not having a single screenshot on the frontpage is not a good sign. I don't count the linked YouTube video as one as it redirects me to YouTube.

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marcopicentini 3y ago

What tool did you use to crete the promo video?

evergre 3y ago

For anyone who needs a hosted/paid/slick alternative, there is https://kubera.com https://kubera.com Disclosure - I work at Kubera.

alexchamberlain 3y ago
Ghostfol.io have a hosted/paid option for 19 USD/year. Is Kubera worth the extra $100+?
- evergre 3y ago
  Please take the 14-day and find out for yourself.
sgarman 3y ago
How successful has the [COMPETITOR] vs Kubera pages in footer technique been for y'all?

scubakid 3y ago

I'm flattered to see they have a page advertising it as an alternative to ProjectionLab (disclosure: I made that). Though I haven't yet seen a part of this tool that makes projections. Did I miss that?

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datavirtue 3y ago

Had trouble hitting back on the browser. Major peave. 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...

iFire 3y ago

LICENSE GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio/blob/main/LICENSE https://github.com/ghostfolio/ghostfolio/blob/main/LICENSE

spaceribs 3y ago

Cool! an open source Angular app!

nomdep 3y ago

Fantastic! Now all what I need is to have wealth to manage

ghostpepper 3y ago

Maybe I'm just getting old but it always makes me skeptical when something is introduced as "Open Source" and then the main landing page includes a pricing tab.

basch 3y ago
Is there a lot of free cloud hosted open source software as a service that isnt ad supported?
mirzap 3y ago
What's wrong with paying for the software? You get the source code, they provide you the service if you don't want to handle it by your self.
- xcdzvyn 3y ago
  I think GP means seeing a pricing section without any extra details suggests the open-source version is limited in some way, with certain features paywalled. That's how I see it.
andersrs 3y ago
People are cheapskates when it comes to OSS. OP put in thousands of commits and only has 18 supporters. They are not exactly a software baron are they? On the other hand you have some onlyfans girls flashing their ass for 10 seconds getting thousands or even millions.
BLKNSLVR 3y ago
I was initially too, but upon reading said Pricing page was pleasantly surprised.

mcgeez 3y ago

Does this retrieve data from your accounts? If so, what does it use to do that? Plaid? 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.

MezzoDelCammin 3y ago
And have You managed do somehow automatize it in the end?

k__ 3y ago

lol, 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

LoveMortuus 3y ago

Why did the site hijack the back button? I tried to return to HN but it just kept reloading into the ghostfol.io site...

wintermutestwin 3y ago
I am always baffled by people who actually use the back and forward buttons. I guess I just assume that everyone opens links by right-clicking and opening in a new tab. Is there some reason why back and forward is a better or even useful option?
- hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
  Mobile devices, for one. 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.
- optymizer 3y ago
  You cannot possibly be serious. Who uses back buttons, on the web? Everybody.
- cwalv 3y ago
  I hit the same problem as gp, on mobile, tho I did open in a new tab (hold+open in new tab). The back button is usually a quick swipe from right to get me back to what I was reading.
- FractalHQ 3y ago
  Cmd+click! Right clicking to open a link in a new tab is uncivilized.

stevofolife 3y ago

Can someone not just make a wealth management spreadsheet in Excel? If anyone has a good one, can you share or sell to me?

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nereus 3y ago
Is this the sort of thing you are after? https://cspersonalfinance.io https://cspersonalfinance.io
- redact207 3y ago
  This is so good. I've tried so many homebaked spreadsheet trackers and semi-complete side project sites. This one looks like it strikes a good balance between feature completeness and simplicity

skeeter2020 3y ago

"saying no to spreadsheets in 2023" 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.

tonfreed 3y ago
The first 6 years of my career was working on data heavy applications. The statisticians on staff all used Excel to prototype their models. It's a great tool
tmpX7dMeXU 3y ago
Petulant NIH syndrome.
dagw 3y ago
Agreed. I have a degree in statistics, years of experience working with data analysis, closer 15 years working with python, know R etc. etc. But if I just want to quickly play around with some numbers to get a quick feel for a problem I almost always still fire up Excel first.

jmprspret 3y ago

I never understand how these kinds of software do data importing. Do you have to manually import these things every time I do a trade or I get my paycheck or spend $2 at the corner shop? If so that seems annoying

esprehn 3y ago
There's bank data aggregators like Yodlee. If the app uses that it can auto import transactions. Ghostfolio seems to be oriented around manual import though (export csv from your bank and import yourself periodically).
gh02t 3y ago
I use Firefly III (which isn't quite the same but similar issue) and import csv exports from my bank and other accounts. I have to jump through some hoops with Selenium to automate downloading the csv files but it works mostly reliably after some fiddling.
bboygravity 3y ago
I just use a spreadsheet in Libre Calc that scrapes prices of securities (almost) live from public sources using an extension. 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

vekker 3y ago

Very nice! Awesome tech stack too; a welcome change from all the React/Next.js projects these days.