Walk Alone

I was pleasantly surprised when Amey took a pro-active step involving Linux. He configured GnuCash to track his investments. Not track as quite a lot of people do - using spreadsheets, but actual real-time tracking with updates of his stock prices at COB. This is as much a victory for open source software as for Indian markets. He has taken that small but significant step into a big world of IT enabled services. If only more people took that step.

After much scolding and persuading by a lot of people, I have enrolled into a Systematic Investment Plan. And there was no doubt I would be using GC to track all that stuff. In the GC options, was a name - AMFI. AMFI is an umbrella association for Mutual Funds in India. The reason it popped up in GC is it provides stocks related feeds which are used for real-time tracking.

As soon as I had my investment details, I followed Amey’s tips and set up my GC account to track my funds. Along the way, I had use a handy GC to QIF converter. Why? I was maintaining yearly accounts with seperate files for each year. Amey told me It would be a bear to track investments across seperate files, and I agreed. GC has no way to merge two account files but it can import two QIF files; hence the converter.

All in all, I stumbled a few times - I’m no guru at financial stuff. With GC and a few knowledgeable friends, I plan to make the journey a bit safer.