My Investments

takesyourchances

I have an android tablet and phone and sticking with android, personally prefer it to apple to use. I checked for an app for this type of thing as it would be a great interface on a tablet.

I reckon if there was a good app for this it would be excellent on android. Maybe this can be a project if you have the skills for this work

Thanks

Porcupine

HL does allow you to add other funds to the X-ray, but you have to do it afresh each time which is a bit awkward.

I'd love to have some kind of analysis tool that I could run on the data myself, without being mediated by a website, especially if it could consolidate all my accounts. For me it absolutely must be automated: I never want to see another 'add fund' box again.
I've made a bit of progress:

* You can download HL transaction data by fetching a pile of URLs like: https://online.hl.co.uk/my-accounts/investment_history_csv/account/22/view/CB/page/1/func/download/startDate/2012-11-23/endDate/2013-02-23
but fully automating this (with your password etc) is harder.
* Morningstar's graphing uses an underlying XML file to get price history data for unit trusts (probably against the T&Cs to use though)
* Some ETFs publish full price history data and holdings (down to 0.01%)
* Big sites like Google Finance and Yahoo Finance are often good data sources (edit: Google Finance's API has gone, but Yahoo allow download of historical unit trust prices. Example Ruby code)
* Perl's Finance:: libraries look handy for automating a lot of this stuff (especially getting quotes and scraping internet banking websites)

Unit trust data is more difficult - finding out the ingredients to the cake can be hard. Similarly for many benchmark indexes (MSCI etc).

There seems to be some open source software around - not quite the right category, but almost:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_analysis_software
There's some other suggestions here:
http://money.stackexchange.com/questions/7247/where-can-i-find-open-source-portfolio-management-software

Whichever way, there's lots of components out there in many languages: joining them could be tedious.

Porcupine

Picking a fund house at random, I found holdings data for Aberdeen. It's in a single huge Excel file per month, one tab to a fund.

Maybe pretending to be an 'institutional investor' helps. I tried:
Jupiter: data from Financial Express, nothing useful
M&G: 'institutional' and 'wealth manager' protected by login, nothing useful as IFA
Neptune: nothing doing, not even top 10
Schroders: nope, powered by MoneyMate

So any holdings data is going to be patchy at best, unless somebody like MorningStar has an API (or something that can be scraped).

Looks like holdings data is filed with the SEC's EDGAR system for funds operating in the US - here's Aberdeen's data and Fidelity. Both are in messy HTML. You don't want to know the price to have this tidied up as an API...

The FSA's equivalent is called GABRIEL - looks better (it's XML) but they don't actually publish the submissions

Alan.W

Porcupine wrote: »

So any holdings data is going to be patchy at best, unless somebody like MorningStar has an API (or something that can be scraped).

I guess I will ask - worst they say no!

I think though, if they can sell analysis tools, they're hardly likely to hand over that data, as there is always somebody who is prepared to not only give away software for free, but open source it so anybody can!

At those prices, for data feeds, no wonder the DIYer can't have a tool - big money to be made, not only in 1.7% Annual commissions and performance fees, but in selling the data to advisers in the first place.

Porcupine

Possibly one way forward is to get historic data, which is less valuable. I've done some more digging around and added what I could find to my posts above, but basically I think the chances are pretty slim.

'Top 10' holdings data is easily available, but I don't think you can do a sensible X-ray from that.

Just a thought though. What you could do is drive an existing website: have an app collect your portfolio, then programmatically create a new virtual portfolio at MS/HL/whoever, process it, grab the results, and delete the portfolio. Then you don't need to have the data yourself. You might be able to infer something by running different operations on the portfolio and composing the results.

Alan53

HL have a virtual portfolio tool which operates separately to the standard portfolio. I use that to monitor funds which i hold which are not necessarily through HL.

Linton

Just found this: Trustnet has a free portfolio facility which also provides asset allocation, risk scoring and performance data. It also has the option of export to Excel.