Does anyone Track their Portfolio with another Application?

Thank you, yea I’m aware and I love trading on TradingView, I just want more data analyzed to do better portfolio management.

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Hi, I’m looking for an app to track gains and losses on Alpaca. If you’re still inviting people to try out your app I’m interested, thanks.

Hi, featherfinance.com recently got the green light from Alpaca to link via OAuth. We’re a portfolio management web app. Helping users keep track of gains and losses is exactly what we’re trying to do.

Would love to try to get the app to work for your account. Give us a try. We’re open to feature requests (e.g. we’ve implemented the tagging of individual trading strategies to help Alpaca track the PL of different algos).

It’s very straightforward to connect your Alpaca account:

Xavier

Hi Xavier,

Thanks for replying with info about Feather Finance. I signed up and linked my Alpaca account.

First of all, I can see that Feather Finance has the potential to address a significant need by providing portfolio insight and analysis via time-weighted returns. Calculating returns and reconciling trades for a portfolio of assets through time is no easy feat.

Some feedback:

The layout is clean and minimal, which is great. I really like the choice of dark background and overall color scheme.

It’s nice to have a selection of benchmarks from which to choose in the performance section rather than a single S&P standard.

I wasn’t sure how to filter by symbol (I played around until I figured out that I needed to click on the symbol next to the word Symbol). Having the ability to filter by symbol offers further granularity. This is a fantastic feature.

A note about the Filters pop-up: the Select All and Clear options are obscured at the top of the list. This could be a browser issue (I’m usually on Safari). Here’s a screenshot:

A question about shorts:

My very basic understanding is that calculating returns for short positions can be very tricky, but I don’t know what issues make it so challenging. Do you know where I can read/research more on this?

And finally, a request:

Would it be possible to reconcile trades in my account back to ~ August 4 (after LB/BBWI corporate actions)? I’ve had difficulty validating and analyzing my trading results with Alpaca. Sometimes Alpaca’s equity report and portfolio history endpoint are not updated for 2-3 days at a time (this seems to coincide with high market volatility) and I cannot fully analyze what is driving the returns during those periods.

Thanks!
~Tif

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback – it is much appreciated! (and yes, I think you identified a bug on safari – we’re usually on chrome)

To answer your question, we should be able to provide you with more history for your alpaca account. We are currently developing a PL analysis report that will help us provide more history while also making sure backdated valuations are accurate. This report will also help you analyse your PL on a day to day basis.

The reason we only provided one week of portfolio history upon signup was because we wanted to make sure the numbers coming out of FF were accurate. We noticed, like you did, that Alpaca’s paper portfolio valuations appear to be off from time to time, which prevents us from reconciling backdated portfolios (hence the short history provided upon signup).

I have to warn you to interpret the time-weighted returns we calculate on short positions with care. I.e. if you filter out the long positions that are in your portfolio and analyse only the returns on your short positions, take the numbers with a pinch of salt. We have not vetted all possible edge cases, and the returns on short positions are notoriously tricky to calculate & interpret (because of the negative market value). Here’s an article that discusses the difficulties with the methodology:
https://blog.confluence.com/abnormal-returns-returns-for-short-positions-and-portfolios

Will get back to you shortly.

Xavier

It should now work. The easiest way to get your history is to reset your portfolio and re-import your transaction history from scratch:

  1. Top Right Menu >> Profile >> “Reset my Account”
  2. Top Left Menu >> “Refresh Linked Accounts”

Note that it can take up to ~1 minute to update your portfolio given the large number of transactions (optimizations are in the pipeline to speed things up).

We’ve developed a PL Attribution report to help users slice and dice their PL:

  • position_pl = position_as_of_start_date x market_change
  • new_trades_pl = PL of trades in period startDate:endDate

and, because you only have activities of type “FILL” for this period:

  • PL = mtm_end_date - mtm_start_date = position_pl + new_trades_pl

Also note that:

  • note that the current version of this spreadsheet assumes all activities are of type “FILL” (which are the only activities you have in your portfolio).
  • both sources of PL (i.e. Position PL & New Trades PL) are broken down by symbol so that you can pin point where your profit or losses are coming from.
  • PL in cell F7 should reconcile with PL in cell F12 (if you’re analyzing PL over a period of several days, these may not reconcile e.g. if there are too many transactions for the number of rows in our spreadsheet)
  • also note that you will be the first beta user of this spreadsheet, so bear with us if any kinks need to be ironed out.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1y00Yf4h_9ubAsy43s0WShHAS5WdJn4vEXeGWFxAgDZ8/edit#gid=2046997999

@Xavier_Robitaille

Hi Xavier,

Thanks so much for providing a way to reconcile historical trades on Feather Finance. I have reset my portfolio as instructed and will review and get back to you with questions.

This PL Attribution report looks like a great way to get a more granular look at account data and analyze performance. I’ll dig into this more later in the week. No worries about being a beta user, happy to provide feedback and reach out to you for help.

Thanks as well for providing a link to that article about time-weighted returns on short positions. I can see that calculating short returns can be very tricky.

Cheers,
~Tif

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Thanks to Xavier for providing this google sheet.

It’s really an easy way to analyze the the portfolio and find out the low- and highperformer in a certain period.

It’s also working with share quantity less than one (fractional), Only the cell formatting is rounded to an integer. The value by self it is correct.

Regards
Daniel

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Thanks Daniel.

Happy to see that it is useful to you too.

Don’t hesitate to post any issues you may find / suggestions you might have (eg. I will change the formatting to show fractional shares better).

Xavier

@Xavier_Robitaille Xavier, happy 2022!

I am planning to reset my paper trading account to start fresh and accommodate fractional shares trading.

Can (should) I download reports/trade history from Feather before resetting my account? Anything else I should look out for?

Thanks,
Tif

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Hi Tif,

Happy NY 2022!

Depending on your needs, I see two relatively effortless options:

  • If your paper trading history, pl, etc. is important to you I suggest you leave your current account as is and create a new one for your 2022 activity.

  • If your paper trading history is not that important to you but you want to keep a trace just in case, you can download your transactions:
    Overview tab >> Transactions Grid >> Download button (right above the table header)).
    image

  • To reset your Feather Finance account go to:
    User Profile (menu @ top right) >> RESET MY ACCOUNT button

Thanks,
Xavier

There are couple of projects born for crypto that can be a starting point, unfornately most of this things is js and i know only a bit of python.

I gave a run to feather finance and i think is really nice !

Thanks @Riodda74 !

Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions / suggestions.

Xavier

Just playing with it for now, a couple of random things that came to my mind are:

  1. Group orders to create a single trade (like buy1 buy2 buy3 sell1 sell2 etc untill the asset goes to zero) to then check the performance of each single trade. Then add the possibility to add some notes to the trade such as (rumors, news, strategy that triggered the trade and so on).
  2. Add some kind of indicators like the sortino or sharpe to the portfolio

For the rest i really like it.
Thanks for make it free for privates !

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Thanks for the suggestions. Appreciate it.

  1. I like your idea to group the different fills coming from the same order. We are already planning on refactoring the “Transactions” table in the Overview page to improve the performance on portfolios with large numbers of transactions. I have added your suggestion to the specs for that “feature”.

  2. Sharpe and Sortino are already underway. They should be available in a month or two.

Xavier

@Riodda74, note that you can already filter by symbol to analyze the performance of your trading on a given symbol:

You can also tag your trades with “strategy” labels and analyze the performance of different trading strategies (if filtering by symbol is too coarse for your analysis).

Yes, for people like me that trade on DCA grouping trades for each trade cycle is important to evaluate the performance of the strategy.
Thanks for considering my inputs, very much looking forward how the platform will evolve.

I had a look to the filter feature, but dealing with several buys is still hard to evaluate the trade cycle.
I have some trade cycles with hundreds buys were anything manual is really impractical.
But is nice feature anyway !

A little side note on filter, if i chose to filter by smbol for example in overview, then the filter is applyed sitewide (that’s fine) but i would add the possiblity to change the filter setting also in other views.