A ghost is haunting Europe, the ghost of bad investment decisions. Now Ghostfolio has entered into the holy alliance of self-hosting to exorcise this ghost ¹

There is no way I can recover from this terribly irrelevant reference. Just like I cannot financially recover my dogecoin investment. But at least with ghostfolio I can check it in every 10 minutes.

I think the first time I heard about ghostfolio was in 2022. At the time, while it filled a void in the self-hosted sea, it lacked some features (compared to Portfolio Performance, which I have to talk about sometime), so I really didn't use it that much.

As I mentioned here before, I use Beancount for my financial needs. Ghostfolio is more for managing your investment portfolio and good for frequent updates, while Beancount is more of an accounting program and not really designed for whipping your phone up for a quick look.

Since I am not a Wallstreetsbets bro, I do not aggressively invest. So Beancount still a better fit for me. Anyways, there have been some updates in Ghostfolio recently and version 2.0 was published last week. So I decided spin the container up again. I took the docker-compose file from the repository, also grabbed the .example.env file and changed the passwords etc. and saved it as .env and started the container. Nothing out of the ordinary so far.

Then you go to https://IP:3333 and ghostfolio is waiting for you. When you click "get started" button, it gives you a token and this will be your login so save it somewhere, if you lose it you start over. The first account will be the admin.

Usage

After figuring out the login page, the first thing you need to do is to go Admin Control and make some tweaks.

• Disable the user signup, especially if you want to expose the instance to public
• Add other currencies you trade in
• Change the base currency in your profile if it is different from the default USD. It will change the reports and analysis.
• Check the other configurations, I don't know, you might find something useful.

Next, go to Accounts and add new ones, or change the default account. These accounts are your brokerage accounts, from which you buy or sell the securities, such as DEGIRO, Bitpanda or Binance. Or that boutique wealth management firm we plebs never heard of it.

After that, you have to start entering your transactions. Go to Portfolio, then Activities. Here you have to enter the transactions. You can do it in 3 ways:

• You can enter manually like an accountant
• You can upload a csv file like a real accountant
• or you can upload a json file like a hacker

The activities are pretty straight forward, you can buy, sell, and collect dividends. You can also track your tangible investments (real estate, cars, or luxury items(?)) and mortgages. With these two, you can calculate your net worth. But don't worry you are more than just a number. Try to not go way below zero...

Integrations, reports and other nice things

For what it's designed for, I think ghostfolio does a good job. The interface is simple, it uses YAHOO FINANCE to regularly update prices, and if I am not mistaken you can add more platforms. There are also comunity projects like a Python client, CLI or some tools to convert Degiro transactions to format that can be imported. The webpage looks nice on mobile.

Ghostfolio offers some nice graphics and reports to give some insight. You can see your unrealized P/L by day, YTD or since inception. However, I am not sure if it presents the realized gains/losses (that's when you sell an asset) very well. Also, I can see Ghostfolio taking on the task of increasing financial literacy. It has a nice allocation tab that shows how diversified your portfolio is. Also an X-RAY tab that shows a simulation that shows how much money you can retire on and where your risks are. The Resources tab is also worth a look, seems to have some nice articles.

Aside from the self-hosting, you have the possibility to use their cloud offerings. You have the free basic plan or you can subscribe to premium plan with all the features of self-hosted version.

Opinion

So, I think I will give Ghostfolio another chance and keep it this time. It's not a complete solution for my financial needs but really nice for a quick glance on how my portfolio is doing. Maybe I can put together a script to sync between Ghostfolio and Beancount using the API or Python client.