Personal Stock Ticker

Have you ever wondered how all your combined investments are performing at a given point of time? While most brokers give easy access to the NAV (Net Asset Value) in an account, many of us have our wealth distributed across multiple brokers and savings accounts in banks. I personally have my investments across 4 different brokers and it takes considerable effort to login to each one of them to track how my net portlio is performing.

I decided to take a stab at automating this process and found it suprisingly easy! Most brokers these days give programmatic API access, while for others it is relatively simple to simulate a browser. Moreover you can represent your net assets in the form of a cool stock ticker!

What does it represent?

Imagine if all your current investments and future investing decisions are bundled into an ETF, this would be the price it trades at.

How does it work?

1. Make a list of all your brokers and their NAV in the same currency unit. Sum it up to get your baseline NAV (B).
2. Set an arbitrary base price (P). I chose 100$.
3. Setup automation to fetch your NAV from all brokers at regular intervals. I wrote python scripts and ran them on AWS.
4. Let's say your NAV at any point of time is T. Your stock ticker would be P*T/B .
5. That's it. You can give the ticker any symbol you like.
6. Every time you make a cash inflow or outflow from your savings make a note. Let's say you added X (X is negative for withdrawal) when ticker price was P'. You need to adjust your baseline NAV so that at the moment of transfer there's no change in price. Hence your new baseline is B'=B+X*P/P'.

_{Note: Any inflow/outflow represents an instant change in your portfolio strategy since you change your cash % allocation. You can choose to split the cash in equal proportions according to your portfolio or consider it as a rebalancing event.}

How do you maintain it?

This requires near-zero maintenance. Once you put in the legwork to setup your scripts, you can easily run them forever in the cloud. The only maintenance you need is to track your inflows and outflows. I made a simple web tool for myself to input any transfer. It's a small overhead since generally transfers happen infrequently.

Technically you can even automate this as you can detect big changes in your total NAV and attribute them to a transfer. It should work well if your refresh rate is small.

What can you do with the ticker?

1. Track your net portfolio performance in real time 24/7 with no extra effort. Since crypto martkets are open all the time, if you have crypto positions then your ticker will update 24/7.
2. Visualize your trading in relative terms to your overall portfolio. For example: Gambling 1000$ on deep OOM options is very different if it accounts for 1% vs 10% of your portfolio.
3. Track correlation with other stocks/indices. Realize your actual exposure to a certain asset.
4. Track hypotheticals. You can easily compare your stock ticker to let's say TSLA and calculate the total money you would have if you had chosen to invest every $ in TSLA and hodled.
5. Track against inflation which I hear is coming.
6. Have the capability to share an investment portfolio without revealing actual amount of money you have put in. The ticker on this page represents my actual portfolio (Pray it goes up!).

Questions?

The scripts I used are available here: Github. If you are interested, please contribute if your broker's API isn't supported yet.
If you have any questions/suggestions feel free to reach out at akshay@infiloop.io