The Money Gopher
The Money Gopher will help you to keep track of your investments.
Why?
Surely, there are a number of programs and services out there that already
manage your portfolio(s), why creating another one? Well there are several
reasons or rather requirements that I have. Note, that these might be very
specific to my use-case, but maybe somebody else will appreciate them as well.
- 🏘️ I need to manage several portfolios for several distinct people, for
example my own and my children's. I want to keep these portfolios completely
separate, but still manageable within the same uniform UI or program. For a
lack of better term, I call this a "portfolio group" for now.
- 💵 All "portfolio groups" could share stock information, such as buy/sell
prices and meta-data. Then they only need to be retrieved once and are
available to all "groups".
- 🤑 Within one "portfolio group", I obviously want to manage several
portfolios, displaying certain performance values (e.g. absolute gain,
time-weighted return, etc.) per portfolio and for the whole group.
- 📱 I want to access this information from multiple devices, e.g., my laptop,
my tablet and my phone. But, I don't necessarily need this information on the
go, so having some kind of "server" locally to my network and a browser-based
UI seems to be perfect. This means that the UI tech stack should reflect
responsiveness and a mobile-friendly design. If I really need this
information on the go, I could then still set this up on a server that I own
or VPN to my home network.
- 👨💻 I love APIs, so having access to this in a RPC or REST API would be
awesome. It is anyway needed for the UI. Maybe also a simple CLI for quick
tasks, such as triggering a refresh of stock information would also be nice.
Furthermore, there are some personal technical motivations that drove me to
creating this.
- 📞 I wanted to explore new ways of providing RPC-style APIs that are not based
on the arguably bloated gRPC framework. Therefore, I am exploring Buf's
Connect framework in this project, which seems
promising, even for browser-based interactions.
- 🔲 I am still on the spiritual search for a good UI framework, so this might
be a good chance to explore different options.
- 📈 I wanted to understand the math behind some of the used performance models,
such as time-weighted rate of return a little bit better.
Usage
This project has currently three main components:
- A server component
moneyd
, which manages the connection to
the database and offers a RPC-API using Connect to
manage portfolios and securities.
- A simple CLI
mgo
which can be used to interact with
the API.
- An even simpler web-based user interface, based on
Next.js.
Starting moneyd
After checking out the source-code, the necessary Go binaries can be compiled
using go build ./cmd/moneyd
and can be started using ./moneyd
. It will print
out some information, but logging definitely needs to improved.
On startup, an SQLite database named money.db
will be created (or loaded) in
the same directory as the started binary. If the database is empty, a new
portfolio named mybank-myportfolio
and one example security will be created.
As a simple check, one can simply interact with the RPC-API with a normal HTTP
client, for example to list all portfolios.
curl \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{}' \
http://localhost:8080/mgo.portfolio.v1.PortfolioService/ListPortfolios
This should print something like the following.
{"portfolios":[{"name":"mybank-myportfolio","displayName":"My Portfolio"}]}
Using mgo
Alternatively, a simple CLI called mgo
can be used. It is preferable to
install it for the current user using go install ./cmd/mgo
. Afterwards, it can
for example used to display all portfolios with mgo portfolio list
.
Adding Transactions
To add transactions (buy, sell, etc.) to an existing portfolio, the command mgo portfolio transaction create
can be used. The following shows an example for
the security with the ISIN US0378331005.
mgo portfolio transactions create US0378331005 --portfolio-name mybank-myportfolio --amount 5 --price 120 --time="2022-01-01 10:00"
When successful, this should print something like the following.
The unique identifier (also called 'name') of the transaction can be used in
other calls, e.g., to modify it.
Available Commands and Shell Completion
For a detailed list of all available commands see mgo --help
. The CLI also
supports (basic) shell completion. For details how to activate it, please see
mgo completion
.
Using the UI
Navigate to the ui
folder and then either start a development server using
npm run dev
or build a production server like the following:
npm run build
npm run start
In either case, the UI is available on http://localhost:3000 and currently
configured to expect the API server at http://localhost:8080. In the future,
this will be made configurable for real server deployments.
When is it finished?
Since I am working on this in my spare time, it will probably take a while 😃.