Ask HN: Which personal investing tools do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which personal investing tools do you use?

89 pointsumitakcn36 comments

I use Quantopian to paper trade a simple algorithm I developed and tweaked over the years, and then check daily and manually execute the trades with with my own broker (Questrade in Canada, which isn't supported by Quantopian's live trading platform).

Quantopian is literally the single most disruptive product in personal finance that I know of: https://www.quantopian.com/

(Not affiliated in any way. Just a really happy user.)

That's quite genius, getting people to write trading algorithms for you for free.

Profits so far, or just paper trading?

it seems like only for pros

I am also a Quantopian user. Amazing stuff.

I use http://investor.vanguard.com to invest in very low cost index funds.

As someone that works for an big investment company ($100B+) this is my only option.

Insider trading regs mean that we can only trade stocks with prior approval which can take hours or from a whitelist of ETFs.

Most trading is simply not allowed.

Betterment. (https://www.betterment.com/). It's passive investing done in the tech world. It sets up your portfolio for you with low-cost investments^1 and low management fees^2. You get automatic rebalancing with intelligent tax minimization^3 when your account gets too unbalanced, and every time you auto-deposit cash, it rebalances your account.

If you're looking to pick specific stocks, this isn't the tool for you. But I want something that gives me control at a high level (how much risk are you willing to take?), but takes care of the details for me^4. And Betterment gives me that. It's really a "set it and forget it" solution.

(Note: I interviewed at Betterment, but didn't get an offer. My friend's brother is employed there on the financial side. I have no financial stake in Betterment other than the money I've invested there.)

[1] The fund with highest fees I have is Vanguard Emerging Markets Government Bond ETF, at a 0.34% fund fees. One other fund is 0.25%; everything else is below 0.20%. These expensive funds are at low percentages of my portfolio.

[2] The most you'll pay is 0.35%: https://www.betterment.com/pricing/. If you have at least $10k, you'll pay 0.25%.

[3] http://support.betterment.com/customer/portal/articles/98745... see "Sell/Buy Rebalancing".

[4] You tell Betterment what your risk tolerance is, and it picks funds for you, and target levels of these funds. It will automatically purchase these funds in the right amounts.

Hellomoney: JSFiddle for backtesting investment portfolios. http://hellomoney.co/

You can design portfolios from 24,000+ stocks and funds, and backtest it as you build it. Helps you understand how input (each holding) affects the output (historical performances) in a "build-to-think" way.

If you frequent finance/investing related parts of Reddit, you might have seen it. It's the official tool of /r/portfolios now.

* Full disclosure: I designed this tool.

Hey there, just wanted to thank you for an incredibly useful tool! I found it randomly through Reddit and while it could be a bit more user friendly, I'm so glad something like this exists.

It would be quite cool to have a mobile version of something like this. I might take on such a project since I'm a mobile developer :)

Happy to hear you found it useful!

As the designer, I admit it could be more user friendly :sob: Please feel free to let me know if you have any suggestions.

If you get to create your own mobile tool, I would love to check it out too.

Is there a tutorial for a total beginner? I wish to start using this to invest but I am at a loss on how to start...

It's one of the highly requested features. We definitely want to add that in the future. My apologies for the inconvenience!

Here are two popular ways to get started:

1. Start with a template:

One way to get started is to scroll down on the homepage, pick one of the "lazy portfolios" and fork it.

For example, you can go to this Three-Fund Portfolio page https://hellomoney.co/portfolio/FsF71j, click "Save As," and tweak the percentages or amounts to your liking.

Although Bogleheads wiki is not the most friendly to beginners, pages like these may be useful for picking the % weights.

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Asset_allocation

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Lazy_portfolios

2. Pick 401(k) funds

If you're in the situation where you need to construct a portfolio from a limited set of 401(k) funds, you can use Hellomoney to pick the funds and the weights.

Click "New Portfolio" on top of the page, delete the default fund (VFINX), and start entering the available funds in your 401(k) plan by name or symbol.

Not all funds may be available on Hellomoney, but you should be able to add a majority of them. (Generally speaking: if you don't see a symbol for the fund, it's not a publicly available fund, and you won't find it on Hellomoney.)

Then you can delete the funds that you're not interested in (high expense ratios for example), or "turn them off" by making their weights $0 or 0%. Here are a few examples:

https://hellomoney.co/portfolio/16fb02

https://hellomoney.co/portfolio/aa4888

As you change the weights, you can see the historical performance that the portfolio would have had in the past, including how much it would have lost/gained in the past crashes and boom times.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any questions.

Great tool.

Any intention of expanding to Australian markets?

Just started with Betterment - pretty simple to use and acts as a blanket over investing. I experimented previously with individual stocks in the market, had reasonably good response. However, I cannot spend time on reading up and making informed decisions.

Curious how betterment will do against WealthFront. On the longer run, I am thinking about splitting the money two ways and put in a bit with both Betterment/Wealth Front as a strategy, possibly.

Check this article from Product Hunt team, there are bunch of tools which can be useful for savings and investment https://medium.com/@producthunt/the-7-best-personal-finance-...

http://seekingalpha.com/ — Good news source

https://stockcharts.com/ — Great chart to guide you in reading technical analyses.

I do massive amount of self due diligence before investing in a company or in a fund.

* Research: Yahoo/Google Finance

* Stock Screen: finviz.com/screener.ashx https://stockflare.com/landing

* Portfolio Visualization(Handy):http://hellomoney.co/

* Portfolio Optimization: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-asset-class-all...

How do you come up with your initial ideas?

Initial idea can come from news/market trend. Once one industry becomes somewhat interesting, lots of research comes after. Normally you have to go through financial statements and ratios of each company and compare these to the targeted industry. Tools like finviz screener helps graphical/technical analysis while stockflare tells a short summary of fundamental analysis about the company itself. If you have other holdings rather than that, portfolio mgmt is indeed needed.

I read hacker news and invest in companies that are clearly leading in the engineering space but wall street buffoons are too stupid to notice. I target companies with upcoming earnings releases, skim the top few "analyst reports," and invest in the ones with gaping holes in the analyses (indicative of stupid investors).

For example, AMZN is frequently undervalued. If you read analyst reports, there are scarce mentions of EC2, almost as if the 23 year old bankers writing the reports don't even realize Amazon has a cloud business. All the reports of "competition" are focused on Amazon retail competition, no mention of google cloud, microsoft, etc..

And yet EC2 is absurdly profitable, with margins far higher than Amazon's retail business. But you wouldn't know that if you just listened to the hot air coming from "analysts," which is exactly what institutional investors listen to.

I've had pretty good returns just trusting my own gut and only investing in tech companies where I am confident I know more than the bankers. If you read the analyst reports, it will usually be pretty clear whether they're making an accurate assessment of value.

https://www.mint.com/ - track your net worth

https://lab.madfientist.com/ - track your FIRE date - Financial Independence Retire Early, otherwise known as FU money (my date is Dec 2022)

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ - learn how to save and invest. And no, you don’t have to be as frugal as Mr Money Mustache.

https://www.reddit.com/r/financialindependence/ - read the sidebar resources and ask questions here if they aren’t answered

When I try to research a company or an industry, I have a lot of trouble keeping track of my research. It would be great if there is a service that I can document and record ideas as well as track key data. My kind of edge that I have is only the ability to read a balance sheet.

A news paper, a legal pad, a pen, a calculator, and my broker's phone number. Well, google news, my computer, and schwab. Mostly same same anyways.

For me, I use Scripbox for my mutual fund investments. There is no customized portfolio like betterment or wealthfront. Scripbox believes in a one-set-of-funds approach coupled with annual review and rebalancing for long term investing. It's available for Indian users.

Full disclosure: I used to work here.

I use r/investing a lot. You can find many tools and experiences. https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/.

Is there a simple tool to estimate returns? I may find it useful.

Canadian Couch Potato and PWL Capital have a rate-of-return calculator:

http://canadiancouchpotato.com/2015/07/13/calculating-your-p...

and scroll down to "Use the Rate of Return Calculator":

https://www.pwlcapital.com/en/Forms/Return-Calculator-Simple

It's a spreadsheet and you just fill in your cashflows.

I use greaterthanzero.com to calculate returns of my portfolio over different time periods and compare against a few simple benchmarks.

/r/wallstreetbets

Bloomberg Anywhere.

Wealthfront

What is your take on WealthFront so far as a product ? How has the investment experience been?

Very easy to set up. The first 15k is managed free, and I am investing less than that, so very happy with that as well. I chose the least risky option as I am just trying to keep up with inflation and will probably be withdrawing in a year or two when I graduate. It gives good visualizations and stats on what range to expect with each option.

Finviz

Como hackeua instagram ?

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