I finally installed an issue tracker to keep track of bug reports and feature request for my portfolio management tool.
You can find the issue tracker under its own domain: http://redmine.dr-dittrich.de/projects/insideeav The links in this blog and in the portfolio management app have already been updated and point to the new site.
The new site also includes an interface to source repositories. I have not decided yet whether I will indeed use this feature. If I do you can expect the source for the frontend, EAv API authentication, and even the data backend to be released and become open source. Give me a while to think about it.
As I had to change some of the code for my portfolio management script today to work around a few changes on EmpireAvenue which have caused among other things a problem with the import of the portfolio and shareholder lists I kept on making changes. I hope they turn out to be improvements…
First, the option “include only the top 5k” will now likely show more than 5000 entries. Why? Instead of sorting by dividends and then by score to find the stocks that are among the top 5000 in that ranking the script now sorts only by dividends looks at position 5000 to find out the dividend at position 5000 and then it will output all stocks that have at least that dividend. A similar change is in effect for the sell page and “exclude the top 5k”. Only stocks that have a dividend smaller than that of the stock at position 5000 will be part of the output. The result is a small speed increase of queries that use these options.
Second, I tried to optimize some of the most time consuming queries and got the query time indeed down to a fraction of the former query times.
Third, I enabled compression for the output. As the compressed output is now only 12-20% the size of the former uncompressed output the loading time of the site, especially for the larger output tables, should be improved as well. And if you are on a metered data plan this will help you, too! Overall, this should be the change with the most noticeable effect.
One of the most recent changes on EmpireAvenue was made with the purpose to make EAv communities more attractive, to get more of the action (back) on the site. With today’s new feature for my portfolio management I want to support this. – Ironic, isn’t it?
There is a new “manage community lists” screen. Here you can import the list of EAv communities in which you are a member. Further, here you can also update the membership lists for your communities so that you can use these list of members your communities on the Buy, Sell, and Ranking screen. These updates are queued to the same remote machine that imports your portfolio and shareholder lists. Hence an update may take a few minutes.
On the Buy, Sell, and Ranking screen you will find now two new query options: to “include only members of” a specific community and to “exclude members of” a community.
Finally, your selection on any drop-down menu will be taken as the default option on the subsequent query forms. A feature that many of you were asking for.
The item “Match buy & sell up to a percentage of shares & value the other has invested in you” as been on the feature request list for I do not know how long. I finally implemented at least a part of that long desired feature.
If you buy shares you can now select to “Buy (at most as many shares as) to match” the number of shares the respective EAv member is holding in your stock. In effect it is adjusting the “maximum number of shares you want to own in a stock” to each stock’s holding in your own stock. If this field is activated you will still spend as many eaves as you entered or buy as many shares as you entered in each selected stock; you will however not invest more than to reach a matching number of shares. The same is, of course, true for selling shares (with changing the “maximum number of shares to own” to “keep at least”).
While this still is not a “buy or sell up to a percentage of shares the other has invested in you” it should come pretty close to the desired feature.
I am hesitant to implement this also for “value of investment”. The share price is a moving target, typically it is increasing, and thus without any change in their holdings in you, you may be buying and selling shares in a stock just because there is a price move at different speeds in your and their stock. What, at the end of the day, is just costing you the trading commission fee.
You can now re-sort the current output of my portfolio management site by just clicking on the column header. Unfortunately, it does not work perfectly with all the columns as it is implemented with a standard javascript library and some columns contain data in a format that seems to confuse the library’s sort function. Nevertheless, better than before when you could not re-sort the table at all…
I may change the (data in the) columns in the future to improve this.
