[Feature Request šŸ”§] APIs for Accessing User Portfolio

Ideas šŸ’”
1

To provide a bit of background: one of my consistent frustrations with brokers in UK is that you donā€™t have easy access to your portfolio data via API unless you are logged in and/or using a blessed application of some sort.

This seems to be a trend thatā€™s reversing in banking (with open API initiatives finally happening). The lack of the openness just resulted in people using web-scrapers or other mechanisms that involved providing credentials - this is obviously insecure and unsatisfactory.

Hence, it would be very interesting to have a well-documented API to enable read-only access to a limited subset of a userā€™s portfolio functionality.

Auth could be done securely via OAuth2 (or similar), allowing a much more controllable and secure experience. For example, you can tie the token and/or credentials to a specific account and app, with easy revocation and carefully scoped permissions.

Iā€™d recommend OpenAPI 3.x (fka Swagger) for documentation, as this is handy for generation of docs and stubs, amongst other things.

Use-cases would include:

  • Allowing smooth and secure integration into new and existing financial applications.
  • Displaying current portfolio value, stock allocations, etc, without needing to log in or re-export data after every trade.
  • Allows safe and simple scripting for software nerds like me ;-).

Just writing this makes me wonder what interesting things you could do with Elasticsearch and Kibana, hmm.

I realise this would likely not be the highest priority, but thought Iā€™d put it out there. Thereā€™s a heck of a lot of additional value to a platform when there is openness and integration opportunities.

Marc

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2

:+1:

API is on the list of ideas to work on. Itā€™s still further out though.

One of the big goals of the upcoming Crowdcube round is to shore up engineering. Weā€™re planning to hire 5 engineers, which will almost double our team size.

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Would be a fantastic thing to get going early on; would allow the community to get involved even further from an early stage and dream up even more use-cases.
Think I read you guys were doing early pentesting of the platform? Something like this would be an obvious target for inclusion in that if it isnā€™t already :slight_smile:

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Sounds great. API-related stuff is what Iā€™ve worked on for the last few years (I work in open source). Iā€™m happy to contribute to the discussions when the topic comes around for more detailed technical exploration.

I have in mind a few excellent open source projects that would work well with the stack youā€™ve published, depending how you approach things.

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For us and external parties like EMMA app ( @edoardomoreni )

The other plus side of this is, we can match it up to Zapier ourselves as they have a API source.

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Dear team,

Are you planning to release an API sometime in the near future as soon as the app is fully available to everyone?

For now and as you start adding more tickers, it would be very useful if you could provide a JSON/XML resource with the list of the current investable universe as well as the exchange associated to it. This will do for now :slight_smile:

Thanks again!

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Weā€™d definitely like to provide an API at some point (Iā€™m a big fan of the idea :smile:) but this isnā€™t on our roadmap for the next 12 months.

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Thanks! Whenever you have a bit more time (low priority jira!), it would be good if you could at least produce a version of the FT stock universe spreadsheet that contains all the current tradable symbols that is from time to time synchronised to the actual tradable universe. The current one on google docs has quite a few hidden rows and has symbols that are unavailable (eg FERG), and is difficult to read with a script when I produce a quant portfolio allocation.

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Is this idea solid enough to make it onto the roadmap as ā€œlaterā€ yet?

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10

+1for a portfolio API
Would be nice to also have access to all avaiable stock prices too so we can write things to monitor share prices

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Connection with IFTTT would be amazing :wink:

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Interesting article on Air Maltaā€™s use of APIs and how itā€™s helped their business. A good read for those who may not know what an API is.

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A vote on this for me without a doubt.

Iā€™ve connected my Monzo account with IFTTT and am using it all the time to move money around.

Also, Iā€™ve become aware of products and services because I have found them on the IFTTT platform, (Monzo being one of those) So itā€™s a potential extra route in for new Freetrade users too. :+1:

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14

Gets my vote. (No surprise!)

Easy to use even for beginners. Welcome to FinKi

Can be used in ways you donā€™t even realise. Imagine, for example, there was a load of new brokerages and trading platforms (sound familiar?) and those platforms didnā€™t find the boring task of linking the latest Key Information Documents an easy one. Ta-dah! Thereā€™s an API for that hereā€¦

https://finki.io/video.html

(yes, the videos are made on my phone in about 2 minutes and are not award winning quality. But you get the point)

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15

I too would like API access to freetrade.

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16

One vote from me. Would be a huge pro against the competition. It would be nice to automate trades, send custom alerts, track portfolio growth, etc.

Looks like the API is lower priority than some features, but something we can expect soon.

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17

Would be great

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This would be awesome! Voted!

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19

Please consider this soon :pray: a lot of functionality could be added by other apps in a short space of time.

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Iā€™m adjusting limit orders based on the current market volatility and itā€™s pretty tricky to keep track of a large number of limit orders on the app UI. Hopefully the API will allow us to query these for easier monitoring :pray:.

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