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by olejorgenb 1024 days ago
Can ledger track performance over time (which I assume Ghostfolio can). Does ledger (or the eco-system around) come with integration towards sources which categorize assets, and can it easily give a breakdown of the exposure according to such categorizations (per industry, per region, etc.)?
2 comments
abdullahkhalids 1024 days ago
I don't know about ledger, but gnucash can track performance over time[1, 2]. I don't think Gnucash can do your second ask on its own.

[1] https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-guide//chapter_inv...

[2] https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v5/C/gnucash-guide//rpt_standar...

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berkes 1024 days ago
Yes, no.

Yes, Ledger can do all those things. No, it doesn't do this "out of the box".

I do most of these things. Simple, by adding meta-tags to my ledger. I'm just now working on consolidating on all my willy-nilly scripts and tools. And then plan to turn this into an actual "investment dashboard" ala ghostfolio but using the ledger as source.

In the end, a plain-text-ledger is just a of database. And the ledger query language (e.g. bean-query-language) a way to query it and produce reports.

So, what you are asking is more like "can SQLite categorize assets, give a breakdown of the exposure according to such cats per industry, region etc". Well, sure it can. But it's a bit of a strange question.

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olejorgenb 1024 days ago
Of course it's possible to implement these features on top of any system which stores the transactions... but I'm sure you agree that to a user it matters that these things are accessible without writing lots of willy-nilly scripts, and preferable not having to add such meta-tags manually when other sources have already categorized them.

Thus I suspect there's space for more specialized solutions like Ghostfolio. Although I myself would prefer if my accounting system could also do these things. (I'd be interested in these willy-nilly scripts. I also enjoy writing willy-nilly scripts, but time is limited)

EDIT: saw the link you already posted

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berkes 1023 days ago
I entirely agree. And this is why I'm building use-focused, case-specific tools around ledger/beancount.
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lannisterstark 1024 days ago
I mean, "It's possible to do this via x amount of work" vs "Here, you can use this OSS/selfhosted version which will do it for you." Do you legitimately not see the appeal of the latter to many people?
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berkes 1023 days ago
I never said that I did not see the appeal. I'm not sure where you got that from.

Au contraire: I'm building my business around that exact problem: that ledger is potentially good at doing anything, but doesn't do it out of the box.

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