Stock software, trendlines

[Mark]

Because I am one tinfoil-hat-wearing, paranoid individual, I am a little
hesitant to show a lot of screenshots... as this is pretty detailed
financial information.

Cacti (for those not familiar with it) is a general purpose graphing
solution for graphing data over time.  Its primary purpose is to track
performance of networking gear.  But if you use it for that purpose and
actually hack on it a little, it becomes painfully obvious that you can
graph anything.  (I graph my tivo, my isp connection, financial stuff,
prepaid cell phone status, netflix usage... just to name a few.  No,
there is no good reason for most of that.)  You might have to add a
little "glue" to do what you want, but it is all very doable.

General cacti screenshots: http://www.cacti.net/screenshots.php
working example sites: http://www.cacti.net/sites_that_use_cacti.php

Take those examples and let your mind wonder and you can graph stock
prices, stock value v stock cost, dividends, individual account
breakdowns, asset summaries, assets v liabilities, retirement v
nonretirement funds, stock ROI, income vs expenses, retirement
predictions based on expenses/returns (i.e.how long till retirement?),
how long will your money last based on current withdraw rates?, etc.

One downside I failed to mention: I put a lot of work in wrapper scripts
to fetch/cache stuff.  It sort of became a monster over time.  What
started out as my wife showing me a bit of graph paper she was keeping
and saying "can you do this?" -- grew to a sort of mini platform of stuff.

Julius wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-01-16 at 15:16 -0600, Mark wrote:
>> Let me start with a caveat that this is probably a bad idea... but this
>> is what I did:
>>
>> I have a backend process that processes the gnucash xml file.  It makes
>> a summary of it.  This summary is readable by cacti.  Cacti then creates
>> trend graphs of a multitude of things (stock prices is part of it, but I
>> have probably 70 graphs of various things.)
>>
>> The plus side is you get a history going back as far as you want.  I
>> have mine for 10 years.  (I've been doing this a while.)  The
>> granularity becomes more and more coarse as you go back.
>>
>> The bad side: the xml file will be changing and this will break.  Soon.
>>
> 
> That sounds interesting, getting the data via Finance::Quote and saving
> it to a database shouldnt be a big problem.
> Ive also found sites that offer old stock quotes as spreadsheets.
> Could you show some screenshots?
> 
> 
> Julius
>