Is there a finance API of some kind to get all holdings for a specific mutual fund?
Generally, the answer to the availability of holdings of a given mutual fund on a daily basis is no. Thus, an API is non-existent. The reasons for the lack of transparency on a daily basis is that it could/would impact the portfolio managers ability to trade. While this information would not necessarily permit individuals from front running the fund manager's trades, it does give insight in to the market outlook and strategy the fund is employing. The closest you'll be able to get to obtaining a list of holdings is by reading the most recent annual report and the quarterly filings each fund is required to file with the SEC.
I've seen this tool.  I'm just having a hard time finding where I can just get a list of all the companies.    For example, you can get up to 100 results at a time, if I just search latest filings for 10-K.  This isn't really an efficient way to go about what I want. I am mostly interested in day to day records, and would like the data to contain information such as dividend payouts, and other parameters commonly available, such as on : http://finviz.com/screener.ashx ... but the kind of queries you can do is limited. For instance you can only go back two years. "Google Finance certainly has data for Tokyo Stock Exchange (called TYO on Google) listings.  You could create a ""portfolio"" consisting of the stocks you care about and then visit it once per day (or write a script to do so)." The big websites, Yahoo and the like, only give the 10 biggest positions of any fund. Download the annual report of the fund, go to page 18, you will find the positions on the 31st of December.  However the actual positions could be different. The same applies to all funds. You need the annual report. You won't be able to know the trading activity in a timely, actionable method in most cases. The exception is if the investor (individual, fund, holding company, non-profit foundation, etc) is a large shareholder of a specific company and therefore required to file their intentions to buy or sell with the SEC. The threshold for this is usually if they own 5% or greater of the outstanding shares. You can, however, get a sense of the holdings for some of the entities you mention with some sleuthing. Publicly-Traded Holding Companies Since you mention Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway is an example of this. Publicly traded companies (that are traded on a US-based exchange) have to file numerous reports with the SEC. Of these, you should review their Annual Report and monitor all filings on the SEC's website. Here's the link to the Berkshire Hathaway profile. Private Foundations Harvard and Yale have private, non-profit foundations. The first place to look would be at the Form 990 filings each is required to file with the IRS. Two sources for these filings are GuideStar.org and the FoundationCenter.org. Keep in mind that if the private foundation is a large enough shareholder in a specific company, they, too, will be required to file their intentions to buy or sell shares in that company. Private Individuals Unless the individual publicly releases their current holdings, the only insight you may get is what they say publicly or have to disclose — again, if they are a major shareholder. "I have some money invested on Merrill Edge. 2 days ago I purchased some mutual funds with most of the rest of my money in my account. I logged in today to see how it did, and noticed that there are 3 sections: Priced Investments, Cash &amp; Money Accounts, and Pending Activity. In the Cash &amp; Money section, there shows a negative balance of Cash (let's say -$1,000) and a positive ""Money Account Value"" (let's say +$1,100).  The ""Money Account"" appears to be made up of $1 shares of something called ""ML Direct Deposit Program"". However, even though the mutual fund purchase was made 2 days ago, and the shares of the mutual funds are officially in my account, I'm still showing all of my ""Money Account"" shares ($1000). The balance sheet effectively makes it look like I somehow needed to have ""sold"" back my money account shares, converted them to cash, and then bought the funds. I'm hoping that isn't the case, and for some reason, there is a multiday lag between me buying stock and money getting deducted from my ""Money Account"". Hope that all makes sense.  TLDR: what's the diff between a Cash account and Money Account that's filled with shares of "" ML Direct Deposit Program""?  Edit: Today the cash and money account offset by equal values equal to one of my mutual fund purchases." "You could use any of various financial APIs (e.g., Yahoo finance) to get prices of some reference stock and bond index funds.  That would be a reasonable approximation to market performance over a given time span. As for inflation data, just googling ""monthly inflation data"" gave me two pages with numbers that seem to agree and go back to 1914.  If you want to double-check their numbers you could go to the source at the BLS. As for whether any existing analysis exists, I'm not sure exactly what you mean.  I don't think you need to do much analysis to show that stock returns are different over different time periods." I searched for FTSE 100 fund on Yahoo Finance and found POW FTSE RAF UK 100 (PSRU.L), among many others.  Google Finance is another possible source that immediately comes to mind. Mutual funds are only traded once per day, while other securities can be traded any time during the day. Mutual funds are actually a collection of other things that have value, such as stocks. The price of a mutual fund is calculated at the end of the day after the market closes by looking at how much the collection of things changed in value during the day. If you are looking for a European financials ETF to short, you could take a look at the iShares EURO STOXX Banks, which is traded on a a few German stock exchanges (Frankfurt etc.): iShares Euro Stoxx Banks Website You find its current holdings here: holdings. The recommended way to track TSP funds in online portfolio tools is to track the underlying index and know that the results are pretty close.   Not a perfect solution: :( Source including suggested ETFs: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/breaking-down-tsp-investment-funds-194600393.html Related, but not exactly what you are looking for, Personal Capital will track your TSP holdings: http://themilitarywallet.com/manage-thrift-savings-plan/ Here is a list to Yahoo! Finance API.  Not sure how much longer this will be support though: https://code.google.com/p/yahoo-finance-managed/wiki/YahooFinanceAPIs Yahoo's primary business isn't providing mutual fund performance data.  They aim to be convenient, but often leave something to be desired in terms of completeness. Try Morningstar instead.  Their mission is investment research. Here's a link to Morningstar's data for the fund you specified.  If you scroll down, you'll see: "For any accounts where you have a wish to keep track of dividends, gains and losses, etc., you will have to set up a an account to hold the separately listed securities.  It looks like you already know how to do this.  Here the trading accounts will help you, especially if you have Finance:Quote set up (to pull security prices from the internet). For the actively-managed accounts, you can just create each managed account and NOT fill it with the separate securities.  You can record the changes in that account in summary each month/year as you prefer. So, you might set up your chart of accounts to include these assets: And this income: The actively-managed accounts will each get set up as Type ""Stock.""  You will create one fake security for each account, which will get your unrealized gains/losses on active accounts showing up in your trading accounts.  The fake securities will NOT be pulling prices from the internet.  Go to     Tools -> Securities Editor -> Add and type in a name such as ""Merrill Lynch Brokerage,"" a symbol such as ""ML1,"" and in the ""Type"" field input something like ""Actively Managed."" In your self-managed accounts, you will record dividends and sales as they occur, and your securities will be set to get quotes online.  You can follow the general GnuCash guides for this.   In your too-many-transactions actively traded accounts, maybe once a month you will gather up your statements and enter the activity in summary to tie the changes in cost basis.  I would suggest making each fake ""share"" equal $1, so if you have a $505 dividend, you buy 505 ""shares"" with it.  So, you might have these transactions for your brokerage account with Merrill Lynch (for example): When you have finished making your period-end summary entries for all the actively-managed accounts, double-check that the share balances of your actively-managed accounts match the cost basis amounts on your statements.  Remember that each fake ""share"" is worth $1 when you enter it.  Once the cost basis is tied, you can go into the price editor (Tools -> Price Editor) and enter a new ""price"" as of the period-end date for each actively-managed account.  The price will be ""Value of Active Acct at Period-End/Cost of Active Acct at Period-End.""  So, if your account was worth $1908 but had a cost basis of $505 on Jan. 31, you would type ""1908/505"" in the price field and Jan. 31, 2017 in the date field. When you run your reports, you will want to choose the price source as ""Nearest in Time"" so that GnuCash grabs the correct quotes. This should make your actively-managed accounts have the correct activity in summary in your GnuCash income accounts and let them work well with the Trading Accounts feature." If you want to go far upstream, you can get mutual fund NAV and dividend data from the Nasdaq Mutual Fund Quotation Service (MFQS). This isn't for end-users but rather is offered as a part of the regulatory framework. Not surprisingly, there is a fee for data access. From Nasdaq's MFQS specifications page: To promote market transparency, Nasdaq operates the Mutual Fund Quotation Service (MFQS). MFQS is designed to facilitate the collection and dissemination of daily price, dividends and capital distributions data for mutual funds, money market funds, unit investment trusts (UITs), annuities and structured products.