December is always a quiet month and this year was no exception. With a majority of staff away on leave, we usually introduce a ‘code freeze’ period. This summer the code freeze started on 18 December and lifted on 8 January. We do this to minimise the risk of critical issues being introduced to our production environments at a time when key staff are absent.

However, in the week between my last product update on 7 December and our code freeze starting on 18 December we did manage to roll out a major new feature in our onboarding of new customers. We have partnered with Snaptrade to provide as seamless a process as possible for the import of both historical and ongoing trades into Sharesight. We have rolled out this new approach to Alpaca customers first, with more integrations to be rolled out in the coming months.

API integrations have always been our preferred method of integrating with Brokers and using a data aggregator such as Snaptrade allows us to offer this more reliable method at scale.

During the code freeze, work didn’t stop and we continued development on our new holdings page, accessible to all users on our beta program. To find the new holdings page, navigate to an existing holding and follow the link at the top of the screen.

We’ve also taken the opportunity during this quieter period to introduce some new internal tooling to assist us in managing the ever increasing volume of both customer support queries and market data points we now handle. For example, we now load around 290,000 new prices every day and if there are issues with any of these price points we need to be able to quickly debug and resolve them. Improved tooling helps us in these efforts.

New functionality/enhancements

• Introduced a small UX improvement on the Australian taxable income report’s tax components form, streamlining confirmation of tax components following the annual update from fund providers
• We’ve improved our handling of underlying holdings on the new exposure report, making this report useful for a wider set of ETFs.

Broker import functionality

• Added support for the seamless import of historical and ongoing Alpaca trades using Snaptrade.