Why I Built Rebalanced

I've been investing online since the early days of E*TRADE — back when "buying stocks online" still felt like a novelty. I also spent ten years at Bloomberg leading equity data groups, which is to say I've spent a meaningful chunk of my career thinking about how market data gets calculated, normalized, and presented to the people making decisions on it.

You'd think that combination would mean I had a tight handle on my own portfolio. It didn't. Not even close.

Over the years I've watched my money grow, shrink, get wiped out, and rebuild itself more than once. I've used just about every tracker, dashboard, and spreadsheet you can imagine to keep an eye on it all.

Then, right around the time I got married, I did what a lot of people do: I cleared out my brokerage account to help pay for the wedding. Worth it. But it meant starting over.

So I started rebuilding. New deposits, new positions, new spreadsheets to track everything across the handful of accounts I'd accumulated. By the end of that year, I was up 28%. I was thrilled. It was one of those rare years where everything seemed to click.

And then I got my equity vesting at work.

It was a big one — easily the largest single deposit I'd ever made into a brokerage account. I moved it in, opened up my trackers the next day to admire the new balance, and that's when things got weird.

And remember — I do this for a living. I've spent a decade around equity data at the level the pros use it. If I was looking at two trackers giving me wildly different answers about my own money, what chance does anyone else have?

That's when it hit me: how could a single deposit — money I hadn't earned in the market, money that had nothing to do with my stock picks or my timing or my discipline — completely rewrite the story of my year? And worse, how could it tell two different lies depending on which app I opened?

I started digging. Some individual brokers do calculate true time-weighted or money-weighted returns inside their walls. But the moment your money lives across multiple accounts — a brokerage here, an old 401(k) there, a Roth IRA, a taxable account, your spouse's account — there is nowhere you can pull it all together and see what your performance actually was.

Not what your balance is. Not what your unrealized gain looks like today. But the real answer to the only question that matters: am I actually good at this, or am I just adding money?

That question is what Rebalanced is built to answer.

I built Rebalanced because I wanted one screen that connects every account I have, normalizes deposits and withdrawals out of the math, and tells me the truth about how my investing decisions are performing — across everything, in one place. Not a number that flatters me when I deposit. Not a number that punishes me for getting paid. Just an honest answer.

But once I started solving that problem, a bigger one came into focus. Knowing your true return is the foundation — but it's only the first question. The next one is: true return compared to what? If I'm up 14% but the S&P is up 18%, I should probably stop patting myself on the back and just buy the index. That's where alpha lives — the gap between you and the market — and almost nobody can see it cleanly across all their accounts.

So Rebalanced grew. It's now a full portfolio analytics platform: live pricing across every position you hold, alpha metrics that benchmark your real performance against the indexes that matter (not just the S&P — the right index for what you're actually holding), and stock research tools built into the same view so you don't have to bounce between five tabs to make a decision.

The thread tying all of it together is the same idea I started with: give investors the truth about what they own, what it's doing, and how it stacks up — in one place, without the math lying to them.