I’ve been looking for something like this. Will check this out. A few questions: 1. Are you guys registered financial advisors 2. Any plans to support robinhood / schwab outside of alpaca? 3. Do you automatically rebalance portfolio? 4. Any automatic tax loss harvesting

Yay (so were we!)!

re: #1 - We are not currently an RIA... this is current a SAAS atop of your existing broker. As such, we make it easy for you to construct the portfolio and single-click easy to execute the portfolio... you are still executing though. We needed to see if there was interest in this concept before registering. The SEC has a newish "RIA registration for fintech apps" category which we are going to pursue.

re: #2 - Robinhood yes... actually... we have that but turned it off because the API from RH is technically unofficial (and changes!). TD, IBRK and Alpaca have offically supported external APIs. Only Alpaca supports fractional trades in addition to that... so we started with them since this enabled us to run this on smaller account sizes! Schwab/Fidelity/Vanguard and the major brokers don't have offical APIs yet. Big emphasis on "yet".

re: #3 - automatic rebalance. Because we are not an RIA, we need you to execute the rebalance. So, until we are... we'll tell you when it's time and make it single-click easy. After becoming an RIA... yep, can make that happen.

re: #4 - TLH... yeah, we can... but its not the magic bullet that the marketing pitches make you think it is. Long convo there :) But implementation wise, yes we could add a TLH option.

Thank you for this! I’m curious if there are products (or interest in products) where people can mirror portfolio of these etf/famous investors at a much smaller expense ratio. This can be done with a combination of data aggregation + alpaca api.

M1 Finance at least lets you set up a portfolio by weight, instead of individual trades: https://www.m1finance.com/

I believe they have an API, so you could automate it.

I think there is a site in the UK called eToro where you can do this. I'm not sure if that's what they do, but it's something along those lines.

Either way, it's a good idea. You might run into regulatory issues but I'm sure it would find a market

Yes, I'm interested. I was thinking along the same lines.

This is great. Thank you so much!!

One request is to include some recommended production deployment. I have spent way too much time on devops every time I start on my weekend project.

Thanks! You know, deployment automation is one of my highest priority tasks. I even wrote a book on it (https://www.saasforge.dev/books/the-book-on-deployment) but I think it would be much better to add some scripts/automation into the boilerplate.

thanks for the link. I long for the day where I can single click and have Flask/ReactJS boilerplate setup with functional public www and local dev environment setup. I only want to focus on business logic. Sorta like Heroku on steroid? (read: I would pay for that)

Thanks for your idea! Btw I created a simple script that literally does the same - you just provide comments and it's sending to GitHub, rebuild the frontend and send command to deploy to AWS. But it's when I already set up everything. I'm thinking to automate much more - the WHOLE process of deployment, from the beginning, and actually, I already did it partially (you can find working snippets in the book). So, stay tuned to know when I implement it :)

Great write up! I have a few questions if anyone familiar with the development can share: 1. How do you handle trust-buster issue: users see a message go through only to check back an hour later that it’s not. 2. For this to work, all components must adhere to this same pattern. How did you handle the migration plan? 3. Seems like something that can work across platform. Any thoughts on c++ layer between android and iOS? Or Facebook tends to go at it platform-focused.

Thank you!

I guess it is handled by a state like ‘sending’. So when you send a message, initial update before sending the request in UI is showing a ‘sending icon’