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Comment by darau1 | Hacker News Reader

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

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"Real" wealth management has a lot more legal work behind it since a non trivial portion of wealth management are topics like inheritance and planing for the next generation. Also wealth management is more focused on wealth preservation than generating high returns, that is more the focus of asset management (e.g. hedge funds, private equity etc.). But since this piece of software is focused on the individual the term seems applicable even though something like personal finance would be more suitable. For "real" wealth management you hire usually professionals. It has a lot of good and bad sides that a majority of people think that when it comes to finance they can compete on an equal level with experts who do this every day. But if your skilled you surely save a ton of fees.

Also wealth management is more focused on wealth preservation than generating high returns, that is more the focus of asset management (e.g. hedge funds, private equity etc.).

This is a bit simplistic. It’s more focused on setting a target return and cash flows consistent with your current life plans. Whether this is a defensive or more aggressive position is really up to you and your goals. But Wealth managers are about putting an investment strategy in place to achieve that. They also help actively manage your portfolio to address macroeconomic trends.

>"Real" wealth management has a lot more legal work behind it

This is just me, but if I had legal work and deep pockets, I'd hire a lawyer.

>a majority of people think that when it comes to finance they can compete on an equal level with experts who do this every day

>But if your skilled you surely save a ton of fees.

If you are "focused on wealth preservation" rather than "generating high returns", what is the need for skill?

If I won the lottery, and I just sent, say, a $500M check to a regular discount broker and bought an index fund, is someone going to take it away from me? Are the wealth management divisions of every podunk bank and credit union there for a reason? Would I need to hire "protection"?

Warren Buffett famously said he "upon his passing, has directed the trustee for his wife’s benefit to “put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund.”

And Barack Obama reportedly put all his assets in government bonds when he became President to avoid conflicts of interest.

Obviously not everyone takes this sort of simple approach, but some famous examples seem to prove it's possible.

> If I won the lottery, and I just sent, say, a $500M check to a regular discount broker and bought an index fund, is someone going to take it away from me? Are the wealth management divisions of every podunk bank and credit union there for a reason? Would I need to hire "protection"?

The market might take it away from you. Last year the S&P returned -20% - there goes $100M!

By this dumb reasoning of unrealised losses, you should never invest in any security (bond or stock) else the exact same scenario may happy. You are destined for the poor house without taking equity index risk in this generation.

I was explaining why capital preservation is important with this (albeit) dumb example. Obviously someone with $500M is going to be a bit more sophisticated about it (there are reasons hedge funds that return 15-20% annualized charge 2 & 20 - or some now do 3 and 30 with a 5yr lockup).

>hedge funds that return 15-20%

This is always a scam. Madoff died in prison, you know.

I agree. Most private money managers are not worth the cost: 75bps per year (or more) on managers balance. I recommend: Half your age in percent (30yrs old -> 15%) invested in 2yr US Treasury notes, plus remaining in low cost S&P 500 ETF. You will beat 99% of "wealth managers" after a decade, and 99.9% after two decades.

Do you have any data to support this?

Vanguard returns, or Warren Buffet's ETF bet against hedge managers come to mind.

> If I won the lottery, and I just sent, say, a $500M check to a regular discount broker and bought an index fund, is someone going to take it away from me?

Not from you, but the IRS will take 40% of everything when you die.* Only 60%, at best, goes to your heirs depending on state law. Unless you proactively plan.

* Yes, yes the $13M federal exemption but that's a rounding error at the $500M+returns scale.

Aw, the poor little workshy brats. If there's three of them they'll have to struggle by on $100 million each. By the safe withdrawal rule, that's just $4 million a year each indefinitely.

Cry me a river.

Good. Should be more like 80%.

No more aristocracies.

I would say ledger is more about knowing where your money is going, and ghostfolio is about making sure you minimize the risk of losing said money all at once after you hit a certain wealth threshold

Can ledger track performance over time (which I assume Ghostfolio can). Does ledger (or the eco-system around) come with integration towards sources which categorize assets, and can it easily give a breakdown of the exposure according to such categorizations (per industry, per region, etc.)?

Yes, no.

Yes, Ledger can do all those things. No, it doesn't do this "out of the box".

I do most of these things. Simple, by adding meta-tags to my ledger. I'm just now working on consolidating on all my willy-nilly scripts and tools. And then plan to turn this into an actual "investment dashboard" ala ghostfolio but using the ledger as source.

In the end, a plain-text-ledger is just a of database. And the ledger query language (e.g. bean-query-language) a way to query it and produce reports.

So, what you are asking is more like "can SQLite categorize assets, give a breakdown of the exposure according to such cats per industry, region etc". Well, sure it can. But it's a bit of a strange question.

Of course it's possible to implement these features on top of any system which stores the transactions... but I'm sure you agree that to a user it matters that these things are accessible without writing lots of willy-nilly scripts, and preferable not having to add such meta-tags manually when other sources have already categorized them.

Thus I suspect there's space for more specialized solutions like Ghostfolio. Although I myself would prefer if my accounting system could also do these things. (I'd be interested in these willy-nilly scripts. I also enjoy writing willy-nilly scripts, but time is limited)

EDIT: saw the link you already posted

I entirely agree. And this is why I'm building use-focused, case-specific tools around ledger/beancount.

I mean, "It's possible to do this via x amount of work" vs "Here, you can use this OSS/selfhosted version which will do it for you." Do you legitimately not see the appeal of the latter to many people?

I never said that I did not see the appeal. I'm not sure where you got that from.

Au contraire: I'm building my business around that exact problem: that ledger is potentially good at doing anything, but doesn't do it out of the box.

I don't know about ledger, but gnucash can track performance over time[1, 2]. I don't think Gnucash can do your second ask on its own.

[1] https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-guide//chapter_inv...

[2] https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-guide//rpt_standar...

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.

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/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.

That's interesting. So, if I understand this thread at all, your projects may help me to "preserve" my "wealth", with ledger?

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 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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