How to Fetch Market Prices

To track the value of your investments (Stocks, ETFs, Crypto) in Beancount, you need to record their market price over time.

The `price` Directive

Manually, you can add prices like this:

2024-01-01 price AAPL 150.00 USD
2024-01-02 price AAPL 152.00 USD

But doing this manually is tedious.

Beancount comes with a tool called bean-price that fetches prices from the internet.

You might need to install extra sources:

pip install beancount-beanprice

You need to tell bean-price where to look for the price. You do this by adding metadata to your commodity directive.

Note: The commodity directive is optional in basic Beancount but required if you want to attach metadata like this. See Syntax Reference.

1980-01-01 commodity AAPL
  price: "Yahoo/AAPL"
  name: "Apple Inc."

1980-01-01 commodity BTC
  price: "Coinbase/BTC-USD"

Run bean-price against your ledger file. It will:

bean-price main.beancount

Usually, you append the output to a separate prices file (e.g., prices.beancount) that you include in your main file.

In main.beancount:

include "prices.beancount"

Run command:

bean-price -e USD main.beancount >> prices.beancount