Show HN: A simple, free web app to track my portfolio across brokers (erincayaz.github.io)

1 points by erinc951 ↗ HN
So, I have been investing for some time now. At first, it was easier to track my portfolio because I was just using one broker, but as time went on, my portfolio became bigger and more diversified (for example, I bought physical gold, deposited money into a savings account at Bank A, and also used Broker A and Broker B because only Broker B had the stocks I wanted to buy).

It just got harder to track my investments, it was also getting harder to understand whether my investments were aligned with the portfolio I had built.

So naturally, I started to search for solutions. At first, I found a few desktop and mobile apps. But the problem with the majority of them was that they were either too complicated to use or just over-engineered. Nearly all the apps had a FIRE calculator, were synced with the market (which was logical, but how can I get the price for physical gold?), or were also trying to track my expenses. I just wanted to track my portfolio. Hence came the second option: using Excel.

And actually, this is the way the majority of people do it. Knowing that, I tried to create an Excel sheet for myself. But the barrier to entry was just too high; I didn't know how to use it, so it just seemed too hard to implement a solution for myself. Also, the user experience just didn't feel very good. I wanted to see pie charts, good fonts, etc. (I could probably do these things with Excel as well, but if I can't even implement a simple sheet, how could I do these cool visuals?).

So, I decided to implement my own solution. My needs were really simple:

- I want to see all my investments on one screen.

- I want to see my P&L.

- I want to see whether my investment ratio is aligned with my portfolio.

- I want to sync it across different devices.

- I want to have different currencies (like EUR, TL) because I invest in different markets.

- I want it to be free.

- I want to see how my investments grow over time.

And that's about it. So, keeping all these things in mind, I built a web app for myself and wanted to share it with you

1 comment

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This is exactly the kind of scratch-your-own-itch story that produces genuinely useful tools. The fact that you ruled out Excel because the barrier was too high is actually a really important insight — there's a massive gap between "technically possible" and "actually usable."

Curious about a few things:

How are you handling price updates for the non-standard assets like physical gold? Manual entry, or did you find an API that covers it?

Also, the multi-currency angle with TL is interesting — currency fluctuation probably creates a whole secondary layer of complexity for your P&L view. How are you displaying that — in a base currency, or showing each position in its native currency?

Last question — have you shown this to anyone outside your own use case yet? Sometimes the constraints that feel personal turn out to be the exact constraints a much bigger group shares. Would love to see where you take it.