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.
"You definitely do want to avoid losing money on repeated currency conversions.  Remember they are making a profit every time you change your currency. A money market fund is basically like a 'savings account' mutual fund.  They are open like mutual funds, in that you can buy or sell at any time.  There don't tend to be fees of any kind (directly) as all management is paid for out of the interest/returns that the fund generates. So using a money market fund to hold the ""cash"" portion of your TFSA or any other account for that matter would be a normal (and ""free"") thing to do. Good Luck" Your idea is a good one, but, as usual, the devil is in the details, and implementation might not be as easy as you think.  The comments on the question have pointed out your Steps 2 and 4 are  not necessarily the best way of doing things, and that perhaps  keeping the principal  amount invested in the same fund instead of taking it all out and re-investing it in a similar, but different, fund might be better. The other points for you to consider are as follows. How do you identify which of the thousands of conventional mutual  funds and ETFs is the average-risk / high-gain mutual fund into which you will place your initial investment?  Broadly speaking, most actively managed mutual fund with average risk are likely to give you  less-than-average gains over long periods of time.  The  unfortunate truth, to which many pay only Lipper service, is that  X% of actively managed mutual funds  in a specific category failed  to beat the average gain of all funds in that category, or the  corresponding index, e.g. S&P 500 Index for large-stock mutual funds, over the past N years, where X is generally between 70 and  100, and N is 5, 10, 15 etc.  Indeed, one of the arguments in  favor of investing in a very low-cost index fund is that you are effectively guaranteed the average gain (or loss :-(, don't forget the possibility of loss). This, of course, is also the argument used against investing in index funds.  Why invest in boring index funds and settle for average gains (at essentially no risk of not getting the average performance: average performance is close to guaranteed) when you can  get much more out of your investments by investing in a fund that is among the (100-X)% funds that had better than average returns?  The difficulty is that which funds are X-rated and which non-X-rated (i.e. rated G = good or PG = pretty good), is known only in hindsight whereas what you need is foresight. As everyone will tell you, past performance does not guarantee future results.  As someone (John Bogle?) said,  when you invest in a mutual fund, you are in the position of a rower in rowboat: you can see where you have been but not where you are going.  In summary, implementation of your strategy needs a good crystal ball to look into the future. There is no such things as a guaranteed bond fund. They also have risks though not necessarily the same as in a stock mutual fund. You need to have a Plan B in mind in case your chosen mutual fund takes a longer time than expected to return the 10% gain that you want to use to trigger profit-taking and investment of the gain into a low-risk bond fund, and also maybe a Plan C in case the vagaries of the market cause your chosen mutual fund to have negative return for some time. What is the exit strategy? The investments offered in 401K are usually limited to a selection of mutual funds offered by a 401K provider.  The 401K providers and the mutual funds charge fees.  The mutual fund industry has a lobbying group that will push for increased 401K contributions to direct money into their mutual funds to collect fees.  The top 401 K provider in 2005 was fidelity.  It managed $337 billion in 401Ks of which $334 billion was directed into mutual funds. Although I would have to use some of the same providers to open an IRA, I would not have to invest in the providers' mutual funds when I open an IRA.  I can buy a stock and hold onto it for 10, 20, 50 years inside of my IRA.  Thus, the only fee the investment company would collect from me would be from when I purchased the stock and when I sold the stock.  Not nearly as profitable as mutual fund fees. A general mutual fund's exact holdings are not known on a day-to-day basis, and so technical tools must work with inexact data. Furthermore, the mutual fund shares' NAV depends on lots of different shares that it holds, and the  results of the kinds of analyses that one can do for a single stock must be commingled to produce something analogous for the fund's NAV. In other words, there is plenty of shooting in the dark going on. That being said, there are plenty of  people who claim to do such analyses and will gladly sell you their results (actually, Buy, Hold, Sell recommendations) for whole fund families (e.g. Vanguard) in the form of a monthly or weekly Newsletter delivered by US Mail (in the old days) or electronically (nowadays). Some people who subscribe to such newsletters swear by them, while others swear at them and don't renew their subscriptions; YMMV. "Bloomberg suggests that two Fidelity funds hold preferred shares of Snapchat Inc.. Preferred shares hold more in common with bonds than with ordinary stock as they pay a fixed dividend, have lower liquidity, and don't have voting rights. Because of this lower liquidity they are not usually offered for sale on the market. Whether these funds are allowed to hold such illiquid assets is more a question for their strategy document than the law; it is completely legal for a company to hold a non-marketable interest in another, even if the company is privately held as Snapchat is. The strategy documents governing what the fund is permitted to hold, however, may restrict ownership either banning non-market holdings or restricting the percentage of assets held in illiquid instruments. Since IPO is very costly, funds like these who look to invest in new companies who have not been through IPO yet are a very good way of taking a diversified position in  start-ups. Since they look to invest directly rather than through the market they are an attractive, low cost way for start-ups to generate funds to grow. The fund deals directly with the owners of the company to buy its shares. The markdown of the stock value reflects the accounting principle of marking to market (MTM) financial assets that do not have a trade price so as to reflect their fair value. This markdown implies that Fidelity believe that the total NPV of the company's net assets is lower than they had previously calculated. This probably reflects a lack of revenue streams coming into the business in the case  of Snapchat. edit: by the way, since there is no market for start-up ""stocks"" pre-IPO my heart sinks a little every time I read the title of this question. I'm going to be sad all day now :(." There are about 250 trading days in a year. There are also about 1,900 stocks listed on the NYSE.  What you're asking for would require about 6.2M rows of data. Depending on the number of attributes you're likely looking at a couple GB of data.  You're only getting that much information through an API or an FTP. "Yes, Interactive Brokers is a good source for live data feeds and they have an API which is used to programmatically access the feeds, you will have to pay for data feeds from the individual data sources though.  The stock exchanges have a very high price for their data and this has stifled innovation in the financial sector for several decades in the united states. But at the same time, it has inflated the value and mystique of ""quants"" doing simple algorithms ""that execute within milliseconds"" for banks and funds.  Also RIZM has live feeds, it is a younger service than other exchanges but helps people tap into any online broker's feeds and let you trade your custom algorithms that way, that is their goal." Returns reported by mutual funds to shareholders, google, etc. are computed after all the funds' costs, including Therefore the returns you see on google finance are the returns you would actually have gotten.