Show HN: Use wealthbot.io to easily setup your own portfolio management platform

you are reading slightly too much into it.

1. please realize that this is an open source project, so every single line of text or code can be changed to your liking. (not to mention that these are simply sample questions, and any end-user can edit them to be as complex or simple as they like). I can just as well ask your feeling about sky-diving and judge your risk tolerance based on that.

2. You have to understand the target audience. Today RIA's can pay lots of money to schwabs, fidelities, etc. Which have significant vendor lock-in and high up-front and maintenance costs, with open source RIA's have a choice they can build out a solution custom tailored to their needs using our platform. They are not locked into any specific security or cost basis. They can compete with robo-advisors without spending millions or hundreds of thousands on technology. (btw, wanna build anther robo advisor, run many firms as SaaS or build an app like Acorns? .. you can do that too).

3. Finally you can try a portfolio consisting of S&P 500 only, another Vanguard LifeStrategy only, and something more complex... just for shits and giggles see whether you can do better or not. (Wanna test a portfolio that is rebalanced vs non-rebalanced? You can do that.)

our platform is open-source alternative to costly closed-sourced solutions (this is not a new market, we are just giving users another choice)... like there are 100's of shopping carts out there, it's time for fintech to embrace some projects which cater to the masses, not only select few.

lots of people are using robo-advisors and RIA services... so i think that part is already proven.

now as far as webo specifically, if the community gets behind it.. this platform can be as secure, robust and feature-full as any fintech platform out there. btw, we are already pretty sophisticated. we spent quite a bit of time building a full fledged solution that has a plethora of popular features (from tax loss harvesting, to muni substitution, to various rebalancing methods and portfolio accounting)... so a lot is done, but a lot of help is also needed from community.

(magento anyone?)

not to mention our goal is to enable not only RIA's but also developers, by allowing them to create plugins (and possibly profit form it)...(again examples are magento/wordpress)

Need a connector to your favorite custodian? there's an app for that. Need a more clever rebalancer? there's an app for that. Need a new theme or improved workflow? How bout additional ACH features?

our product is highly modularized so having developers hook into the system to expand on the core features is something that's more important to me personally than seeing if s&p 500 will outperform my personal EFT portfolio (which it hasn't ;)

Having spent 6 years as a fully licensed Financial/Investment advisor as firms both large and small (independent), I can say that while I think this is a cool project, marketing it towards investment advisors likely isn't going to get much traction. This is because 99% of advisors (in the US) already have access to tools like this, except much more in depth and integrated with their trading systems. It's in every broker-dealer's (the companies whose investment products the advisors are selling) best interest to provide as much sales support and tooling as possible to their registered reps, so many of them provide things like this free of charge.

Aside from that, unless this has been vetted and audited by FINRA or a registered CRCP, the chances that any compliance officer (which every RIA is required to have), are virtually non-existent. I haven't dug into the platform to see what type of guidance you're offering/presenting, but you need to be really careful about what advice you give or state that you give. As in the US, anything even remotely related to any investment vehicle is highly regulated and providing guidance and advice without the required registrations, licenses and oversight can and will land you in very hot water, very fast.

All that said, I think with the right approach, something like this could be great for personal use as long as it integrated with multiple investment companies and could track and recommend based on all of them.

Would you like to publish the demo data to the repo as well, so we can test this app locally with some relevant data loaded? Thanks!

So, betterment (for example) offers something called betterment institutional where the advisor has to pay that same .1-.3% of AUM to provide those services to her clients.

This ends up costing the advisor hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.

Or an advisor could pay someone like (future) you, who's familiar with Vagrant and knows the wealthbot platform inside-out, to implement wealthbot.io at her firm for a 1 time fee.

Seems like an easy choice :)