Is there an app to manage and track pension funds?

LV_426

gm0 said:

Web scraping, Excel/clones, Yahoo Finance, People clinging onto MSFT Money ancient licenses.  PDF downloads.
If you can automate the regular scrape of data for your schemes (or somewhere you move them to if archaic) onto your IT or to an AWS cloud VM then you can clearly hook up a homebrew app up to look at it if that's your thing. 

But it's clearly for fun not for profit as scaling it to all combos of possible historic schemes (not all on the web) and the fund universe of fund versions and drag is well tricky. And to serve walkup customers that's what is needed. 
The market price is to low to bother with it even with the large number of potential customers.  The Pensions Dashboard if it ever crawls into the light will like the SP forecast be free so there is that.

If you start helping people with the app to make choices then you are into a regulated space really quickly and any "missing data" could bite you in the backside.  FCA COP etc.

Have fun though - why the heck not

Oh god no I wouldn't be helping people make choices. It would be for information purposes only, not advisory.

Alexland

ajfielden said:

Oh god no I wouldn't be helping people make choices. It would be for information purposes only, not advisory.

Have a play with the trustnet charting tool and consider how much time and money they have already invested in collecting the underlying data and supporting algorithms then be realistic on if you can do a better job as a retirement hobby.

LV_426

Alexland said:

ajfielden said:

Oh god no I wouldn't be helping people make choices. It would be for information purposes only, not advisory.

Have a play with the trustnet charting tool and consider how much time and money they have already invested in collecting the underlying data and supporting algorithms then be realistic on if you can do a better job as a retirement hobby.

Um, it's not a competition, but software development is my job.

Alexland

ajfielden said:

Um, it's not a competition, but software development is my job.

Sure but you will probably have worked in teams and have an understanding of the enormous resources that will have been spent on developing products like Morningstar etc. The problem is the choice of investments is huge and the underlying data vast. Better to specialise in something than try and track the whole market. For example developing a retirement cashflow planning tool, etc.

LV_426

Alexland said:

ajfielden said:

Um, it's not a competition, but software development is my job.

Sure but you will probably have worked in teams and have an understanding of the enormous resources that will have been spent on developing products like Morningstar etc. The problem is the choice of investments is huge and the underlying data vast. Better to specialise in something than try and track the whole market. For example developing a retirement cashflow planning tool, etc.

I'm not initially going to make a general purpose app, used to provide detailed analysis. That scope is just too big.
I want to initially make something to monitor my own specific funds. If I design it with wider scope in mind it could prove generally useful. In fact most truly useful apps are born from solving a problem for the developer themselves.
But yes I'm fully aware of the resources and time it takes to build a complex software application. I've been doing it for 30 years 

On the subject of retirement and cashflow planning - you mean something like Voyant? That thing is a masterpiece. I would guess there's years of development work gone into it. So if anything, doing something like is going to be much harder than displaying a bunch of graphs for a selection of investment funds.

jamesd

Trustnet can do it, by creating a single pension with the combined investments of each pension. You can also have another account with them all reported individually. Trustnet won't allow for the units added by refunds for discounts, those need to be added by you by hand.

dunstonh

Financial Express have APIs that feed the data into third-party software.  However, typically, you are looking at £xx,xxx for basic info and £xxx,xxx for full detail.

LV_426

dunstonh said:

Financial Express have APIs that feed the data into third-party software.  However, typically, you are looking at £xx,xxx for basic info and £xxx,xxx for full detail.

I did wonder if there were any APIs available. Otherwise as mentioned previously, it's a question of scraping websites for the data.

cfw1994

Am I the only one that quite enjoys my 20-30 minutes over every weekend pulling data in from a few accounts to update our fiscal position?  🤣
I cannot imagine wanting a tool to scrape into those financial pots, I'd rather Aviva (etc) kept those private!!

Even when things dip, I take a perverse pleasure if (as is most often the case) I see the main DC pot fall by lower than the FTSE/NASDAQ/DOW/S&P have fallen that week 👀

Yup, cut'n'paste is my pal along this route.....spreadsheets my tool of choice 💪

LV_426

cfw1994 said:

Am I the only one that quite enjoys my 20-30 minutes over every weekend pulling data in from a few accounts to update our fiscal position?  🤣
I cannot imagine wanting a tool to scrape into those financial pots, I'd rather Aviva (etc) kept those private!!

Even when things dip, I take a perverse pleasure if (as is most often the case) I see the main DC pot fall by lower than the FTSE/NASDAQ/DOW/S&P have fallen that week 👀

Yup, cut'n'paste is my pal along this route.....spreadsheets my tool of choice 💪

Well I must admit that I am warming to spreadsheets. 
But I am a coder and that is what I like doing, so building an Android app is quite a fun thing for me to do.

FTSE has taken a battering recently, so end of week round up won't be so good this time