You probably know, @cculber2, that our data aggregator, Yodlee, can provide investment “holdings” information to our backend when those accounts are linked in the Console. Long ago, when we ran data feeds via the old “feedbot”, we offered core sheet called Position History that updated with this information.
When we rebuilt the data feeds to work via the add-on, the change delivered many important customer benefits, but one thing that was lost was the Position History core sheet.
I know some of the team, including @Peter, are keen to bring back holdings data at some point (given the need which you acknowledge).
One challenge that is slowing us down (along with the many other important stories in the engineering pipeline) is settling on a standard for the report. In other words, if we are going to populate this data set again, how do we standardize the output out of the gate to give it the most runway for all the many potential customer uses?
The old Position History format is mocked up here. It functioned a lot like the Balance History sheet with a row for each holding for each day. A challenge with this is the massive proliferation of data and the challenge of building performant templates to digest and summarize the data; the Net Worth template is the closest analog and can be cripplingly slow with many linked accounts but imagine 100’s of holdings updated daily with formulas trying to render that data set on a monthly or weekly basis… (So, is it best to always append new data? Or should the report just overwrite with the latest position— i.e. more performant, but unable to track history?)
I can’t make any promises on the prioritization in the engineering pipeline (which @heather manages), but, if you have insights or suggestions on what would be helpful from a core sheet & reporting perspective, that could help unstick the reporting.
@randy I moved this to a new discussion topic because it’s not really relevant to the original “rollover adjustment” topic where you started it and would love for this to be more visible in the community as we think about it for the future
The official feature request is here and if you care about this you should vote for it!
I am still tracking my investments in a Tiller sheet created and fed by the old Feedbot. I do this because it is essential for me to keep track of different mutual funds within one account. It can be a little slow but it works. I would want to keep historical data not just the current position.
I don’t know if you can see my sheet to see how use this data but I would be happy to give you permission if that would help.
I’d love to know more about how you use the data. Do you look over the historic positions data in their raw, tabular form? Do you have a roll-up sheet (like our Balances sheet for Balance History) that shows extracts values? Do you have a charting sheet (like our Net Worth sheet for Balance History) that shows values over time?
Are you willing to share about how many positions you track, for how long, and how many rows that has created in your sheet? (Feel free to DM me this last bit if you would rather not share in the forum.)
Personally, I’m only interested in current holdings getting updated and having the ability to assign custom asset classes/sectors to a particular security and see it graphed in a pie chart and illustrated in a table. The most important thing for me is to see my overall asset allocation and how it is changing as I purchase more investments and my security prices move higher or lower. If I need more detailed history, I go to my brokerage website to get that.
I would find this extremely useful to help automate regular rebalancing of investments.
For rebalancing, the history would not be important. For people that need the history, I’m wondering if there is a compromise like a (configurable?) backup schedule that would only keep a certain number of daily/weekly/monthly/yearly results. Then you could just append and separately prune the extra data.
Another possibility might be to have a simple option that let’s you choose append vs overwrite so each user could decide between performance vs history.
@ehorlbeck I was thinking of something similar. Possibly daily data for two weeks, weekly data for two months, monthly data for two years, and yearly data beyond that. That would allow for making comparisons and spotting trends
Perhaps the retention threshold for each unit of time specified above could be customizable?
I know for me, what I really need is all of my current holdings, their purchase dates, cost bases, from all my accounts. With that, I can create a dashboard of all my holdings, their asset classes, the distribution across taxed and tax-free accounts, current valuation, taxation liability if sold today, etc. Right now, I can get a lot of this info per account at each brokerage, but my issue is, between my wife and I, we have almost 30 accounts across 10 different brokerages. I make do with Personal Capital to show me all that right now but I explicitly want to go away from them.
Thank you @randy for putting the options and tradeoffs so clearly to the community! I’m sorry I’m late to the game for feedback, but hopefully it helps!
Current positions are the most important, but the historical transaction and position detail are very desirable as well. This transaction detail can be used primarily to establish tax basis and note annual contributions (to inform contribution limits to IRAs, 401ks, etc.). I also want to look at historical values of the positions to potentially look at return (that is stretching the scope a bit though). Spreadsheet performance should definitely be a consideration, but the primary roll-up I’m concerned about (asset allocation) would only come from the latest position information and we don’t have to go over the previous position values. The contribution roll-up is for a particular time period so I’m hopeful that limiting the data will help keep the spreadsheet performance on track.
Allowing the user to customize asset allocations to each position and roll those up to an overall portfolio asset allocation will be something I would use as well. I’ve built these spreadsheets in the past and would love to have that data automated in tiller! One issue of note is to be able to assign a particular position to multiple asset classes (e.g. Vanguard Target Retirement 2030 to 67% stocks, 32% bonds, 1% cash). In my experience people will want to customize their own asset classes (some people look at traditional asset classes, some by sector, some by mutual funds/stocks/ETFs, some break out by length of bonds … there are many ways to slice the data) but they all want to roll up those categories into a total portfolio view.
One thought w.r.t. maintaining/capturing history – if you provided a feed that always provided the “current” holdings, it would be pretty trivial as an exercise for the reader to snapshot the current state as needed. Or Tiller could add a module which did the snapshot at some user-chosen frequency, but was default off for most.
E.g. I’m imagining a “holdings history” flag that just took a snapshot of holdings w/ a date stamp and added it to another sheet. Then if they have tons of holdings, but only needed monthly granularity – it would only run at the start of the month and copy data over. Could be done manually, could be done w/ app script, or bundled as a feature in Tiller.
Add my name to the list of someone who is most interested in the current holdings.
Glad to see this discussed! I personally only need the current positions. I would feed this into a custom sheet that tracks current and target allocation percentages per security, and also calculates the purchase amount for monthly inflows.
Right now, I pull in the current positions in my Interactive Brokers accounts from Wealthica, but they don’t support Schwab. And I would greatly prefer only having to use one service.
I suspect that 90% of your clients who want position data are primarily interested in current positions (including cost basis, if available).
+1 also need it for the current holdings and cost basis.
Bought Tiller subscription assuming this would be available. Not having this available makes it much less useful for me because I’ll still need to look into each investment account to update with my latest holdings, etc.
@Blake, as with many things they take longer than expected
But, I should point out that this new beta for holdings will only be available to folks on our YSL integration with Yodlee. I believe you’re still on the Legacy version.
Hi @heather - if I am using YSL integration, is it possible to have the ticker symbol added as an extra column on my Transactions sheet and have this automatically populated? Or would I have to wait for the holdings beta to be able to do this?
I’ve signed up for the holdings beta, but even just being able to capture the ticker on my transactions without populating it manually would be very useful right now.
