
Show HN: Use wealthbot.io to easily setup your own portfolio management platform - geno149
https://github.com/wealthbot-io/wealthbot
======
tjsix
Having spent 6 years as a fully licensed Financial/Investment advisor as firms
both large and small (independent), I can say that while I think this is a
cool project, marketing it towards investment advisors likely isn't going to
get much traction. This is because 99% of advisors (in the US) already have
access to tools like this, except much more in depth and integrated with their
trading systems. It's in every broker-dealer's (the companies whose investment
products the advisors are selling) best interest to provide as much sales
support and tooling as possible to their registered reps, so many of them
provide things like this free of charge.

Aside from that, unless this has been vetted and audited by FINRA or a
registered CRCP, the chances that any compliance officer (which every RIA is
required to have), are virtually non-existent. I haven't dug into the platform
to see what type of guidance you're offering/presenting, but you need to be
really careful about what advice you give or state that you give. As in the
US, anything even remotely related to any investment vehicle is highly
regulated and providing guidance and advice without the required
registrations, licenses and oversight can and will land you in very hot water,
very fast.

All that said, I think with the right approach, something like this could be
great for personal use as long as it integrated with multiple investment
companies and could track and recommend based on all of them.

~~~
geno149
Are you saying all software used by RIAs has do be vetted and audited by FINRA
or a CRCP? I don't believe this to be true.

We don't offer advice, only code.

Could you point me to a few custodians or broker/dealers that provide
portfolio management & rebalancing software for free? We haven't found any,
but def don't have the same experience as you, so maybe we're just missing
something.

~~~
tjsix
No, I'm not saying software used by advisors HAS to be vetted. I'm saying that
I don't know a single compliance officer that would green light a piece of
software that provides any type of financial analysis, or recommendations to
be used by their company as a whole without it being audited. Due to
regulations, the risk is just too high. Now whether the individual advisors
use it on their own is a different story. But the main issue there is that
there are already an obnoxious number of channels, apps, systems that advisors
have to use, the last thing most want to do is add another system into the
mix, unless that system greatly simplifies things and integrates into their
existing systems somehow, it probably isn't going to happen.

You're not offering advice, but you're offering the code which generates
recommendations on position allocations. Any recommendation is considered
'advice' by FINRA and has to follow strict suitability requirements. Whether
or not this would require any registration, licensing, etc on your part I have
no idea, but it's definitely something I'd check into just to be safe. In
general as long as you're not charging in some way for said advice there's no
FINRA requirements, BUT that doesn't mean there wouldn't be any liability.

Every broker/dealer has their own management software/platform for client
accounts, some more comprehensive than others. Though I don't know any of them
that allow use by the general public, you have be be a registered rep of their
firm to use them. The reason you don't see them publicly available is because
of regulatory requirements regarding suitability for recommendations. Though
companies like Fidelity and Schwab have some pretty in-depth tools for account
management on their sites.

~~~
geno149
I see what you're saying. Agreed, there are barriers to entry and the market
is competitive.

I think one place we haven't been clear yet is what wealthbot.io does. He
doesn't actually generate recommendations on position allocations. He is a
platform for advisors to set up their own risk questionnaire and tie that risk
questionnaire to a portfolio of the advisors creation.

Questionnaire shows risk rating = 20? Assign portfolio with risk rating = 20

It's up to the advisor to create a risk profile questionnaire and the
portfolios.

Otherwise, I think we're on the same page. This is a tough regulatory market
and there are a lot of (confusing) options out there for advisors.

------
pbreit
Sorry, but I don't see anyone using this ever. Managing money is mostly about
making constituents feel comfortable and this does not. This doesn't strike me
as the type of subject matter to do as a side-project or hobby.

~~~
captnmeowmix
I don't understand this kind of cynicism. As a financially literate
individual, I think this is pretty cool and will probably give it a go at some
point. What's more comforting than a locally hosted app in a vm you can tailor
however you want? I certainly prefer that over handing all my financial data
to some 'cloud' service.

~~~
pbreit
I really don't like being critical but I think this is just kind of silly (at
least for US citizens). For example, first survey question: are you
"Interested in experiencing dramatic short term losses for better returns?".
"Interested"? Really? "Dramatic"? Is that just unfortunate word choice or is
this thing just not legit?

First of all, Betterment and Wealthfront are good companies. If "startups"
concern you, check out Schwab's robo-advisor service or, better, get a
Vanguard LifeStrategy fund.

~~~
peteretep

        > get a Vanguard LifeStrategy fund
    

Struggle to think of many investment choices that this isn't the right answer
to.

~~~
nerfhammer
Taxes. Vanguard's LifeStrategy and Target Retirement funds were not meant to
be tax efficient.

~~~
peteretep
Isn't that a function of the wrapper, rather than the fund? Both investments I
have in Vanguard are entirely tax free...

------
beberlei
Cool! Even if a demo is great, with the complexity to setup I would prefer
screenshots as well to show some standard use-cases.

On the technical side: You should really upgrade Symfony to version 2.7 (new
LTS), the 2.1 you use is not supported aynmore. In the demo (production
environment) you should hide the webtoolbar for security reasons.

~~~
vladko
upgrading symfony is one of the key things we are working on right now.

don't think of the demo as production, it's just a test server with some dummy
data, where you can play around with features of webo.

as open source projects we welcome all the help and as many pull requests as
possible :)

~~~
UserRights
Would you like to publish the demo data to the repo as well, so we can test
this app locally with some relevant data loaded? Thanks!

~~~
vladko
it's available.. it's actually loaded for you by vagrant as fixtures..

the actual command it runs is: doctrine:fixtures:load

(which are in the Fixtures bundle).

the script which setups the demo data is located in
vagrant/puphpet/files/exec-once

if you don't use vagrant you'll need to run that sort of setup manually

~~~
geno149
And the actual data is here - [https://github.com/wealthbot-
io/wealthbot/tree/master/src/We...](https://github.com/wealthbot-
io/wealthbot/tree/master/src/Wealthbot/FixturesBundle)

Here's some more info on working with Symfony's fixtures bundle -
[http://symfony.com/doc/current/bundles/DoctrineFixturesBundl...](http://symfony.com/doc/current/bundles/DoctrineFixturesBundle/index.html)

------
robbfitzsimmons
Really like this. Even the cheapest robo-advisors like Betterment charge
0.1-0.3% on top of the fund fees, which sounds small but eats into gains over
time.

However, I think the target audience is probably more likely individuals
rather than financial advisors, unless you're going to be running it as a
SaaS. I can't see the overlap of small advisory firms and those familiar with
Vagrant.

Will give it a poke with a few hundred dollars in Vanguard ETFs.

~~~
geno149
So, betterment (for example) offers something called betterment institutional
where the advisor has to pay that same .1-.3% of AUM to provide those services
to her clients.

This ends up costing the advisor hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

Or an advisor could pay someone like (future) you, who's familiar with Vagrant
and knows the wealthbot platform inside-out, to implement wealthbot.io at her
firm for a 1 time fee.

Seems like an easy choice :)

------
hughdbrown
The technology stack of this application gives me pause, if I am reading the
included vagrantfile correctly: ruby and python and php; nginx and apache2;
mysql and postgresql and sqlite and mongodb; redis and rabbitmq. Why so many
overlapping choices? And I tend to think that the whole vagrant + puppet
installation would be way faster and simpler just using docker.

~~~
vladko
the vagrant config is a little confusing at first glance.

note, this is a typical config file provisioned by puphpet ...

if you look closely not all of those packages are marked for installation.
(install : 1/0) so we only use a faction of those listed. a basic lammp stack,
i guess + some necessary php extensions.

p.s. as to why all the entries are there i guess it was easier to generate a
file with everything and enable/disable various tools as needed. i.e. i decide
to switch from apache to nginx change apache isntall = 0, nginx intall = 1..

------
MikeTV
Does this hook up to my brokerage account and perform rebalancing and tax-loss
harvesting a la Betterment/Wealthfront? It looks like it might, but with extra
layers of complication to jump through first since I'm both pseudo-RIA and
client. A step-by-step guide or "manage my own funds only" configuration would
be helpful.

~~~
geno149
Mike, these are great ideas, we definitely want to make it easier for users to
setup their own account.

Just so you know, our roadmap is public -
[https://trello.com/b/klhsT5Xj/wealthbot-io-roadmap-and-
ideas](https://trello.com/b/klhsT5Xj/wealthbot-io-roadmap-and-ideas)

and you can suggest new feature ideas here -
[https://trello.com/b/klhsT5Xj/wealthbot-io-roadmap-and-
ideas](https://trello.com/b/klhsT5Xj/wealthbot-io-roadmap-and-ideas)

Thanks!

~~~
nerfhammer
Yea, a bot that just runs your Vanguard account like betterment/wealthfront
would but without their fees would provide a huge amount of value to people.

~~~
vladko
that's kind of what wealthbot does...

you can set it up to manage your own portfolio. i.e. you can set yourself up
as an RIA and a client of your own firm, the on-boarding process for both
sides takes 45 min total. And if you are good enough with writing code you can
script all your setup data (we have examples of that).. than setup is even
faster.

Once that's done you can run the rebalancer on tolerance or quarterly (time-
frame) basis to rebalance your own portfolio without any fees.

You'd only pay fees with your custodian if you decided to execute the trades
proposed by the rebalancer.

------
jsweojtj
I'm reading the Readme -- what's RIA?

~~~
skeuomorf
"A Registered Investment Adviser (RIA) is an investment adviser (IA)
registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission or a state's securities
agency." [0]

"A Registered Investment Advisor is defined by The Investment Advisers Act of
1940 as a "person or firm that, for compensation, is engaged in the act of
providing advice, making recommendations, issuing reports or furnishing
analyses on securities, either directly or through publications." An
investment advisor has a fiduciary duty to his or her clients, which means
that he or she has a fundamental obligation to provide suitable investment
advice and always act in the clients' best interests." [1]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_Investment_Advisor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_Investment_Advisor)

[1]
[http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/ria.asp](http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/ria.asp)

------
fourstar
What part of this is written in COBOL? I was looking in the repo but couldn't
find anything to match.

~~~
geno149
None actually. Haven't gotten around to troubleshooting linguist yet -
[https://github.com/github/linguist#troubleshooting](https://github.com/github/linguist#troubleshooting)

~~~
erichurkman
Pretty sure it's this large file.

[https://github.com/wealthbot-
io/wealthbot/blob/master/system...](https://github.com/wealthbot-
io/wealthbot/blob/master/system/incoming_files/TD/ZLU/unrealized/TD110701.CBL)

~~~
geno149
Yay, thanks for that! Fixed. That's been so annoying.

------
kevan
It seems like this is targeted at Investment Advisors, would it be useful for
the rest of us without any finance training?

~~~
geno149
You could use it to track the performance and to rebalance your own portfolio.

Here's some background on rebalancing:
[http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Rebalancing](http://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Rebalancing)

Btw, I highly recommend Bogleheads.com if you want to learn more about
personal portfolio management.

~~~
saryant
When I got my first job after college I somehow stumbled upon Bogleheads.org
after receiving an indecipherable 401k information packet and trying to figure
out what to do. An invaluable resource, their wiki led me to the church of
low-cost index funds.

And that's the story of how I realized my roommate had screwed me over when he
convinced me to open a Roth IRA with him at Primerica with the money from my
junior-year internship. >1.5% ER, 12b1 fee, front-load sales, the works.

He ended our friendship when I transferred the account to Vanguard.

~~~
seanp2k2
You don't need friends or funds like that :) I always recommend low-cost index
funds to anyone who asks, even though I'm no pro investor. It just seems like
a pretty obvious way to not miss out if the market moves without risking much
more than anyone else if it tanks.

------
dbbolton
Why is VirtualBox a prereq? This appears to be a locally-run web app, unless
I'm missing something.

~~~
fletchowns
Because the author was nice enough to provide a Vagrantfile that can easily
spin up a box that gets provisioned with all the required software installed.
Sure you could probably run it on your host OS, but why would you even want to
bother with that?

