Stock software, trendlines

[Robert Heller]

At Sat, 17 Jan 2009 12:29:46 -0600 Mark <snark at pobox.com> wrote:

> 
> 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.

How different is Cacti from GNUPlot?

> 
> 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
> > 
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