About

A paper-trading portfolio: one person, Niko, buying and selling US stocks with virtual money and writing down why, every time. Nothing here is real money, and nothing here is advice. It is a public record of decisions, kept honest by rules the site enforces rather than by promises.

• US stocks and funds only. A buy is a dollar amount and can be a fraction of a share, counted exactly to the millionth; a sell can be any part of a holding. No fees, no borrowing, no short selling, and dividends are not counted.
• Trades can only be recorded while the US market is open. The price is taken by the server at the moment a trade is recorded, never typed in: a buy fills at the asking price and a sell at the bidding price.
• A price that is more than 5 minutes old, that has only one side, or where the gap between buying and selling is wider than 2%, is refused rather than used.
• Niko can restart the portfolio with fresh virtual cash. Earlier runs are kept, but only the current one is shown here, and its figures are measured from the day it began.
• Within a run, the record cannot be rewritten. A trade can never be edited or deleted, and the starting cash is locked by the run's first trade. A mistake is corrected with an opposite trade, in the open.
• The reasoning behind a trade can be edited, but every earlier version is shown on that trade's page, marked as edited.
• When a company splits its stock, the share count follows automatically, exactly to the millionth of a share.

• The portfolio is valued once a day, after the US market closes, at each stock's closing price. Figures on this site are as of the latest recorded close, and say which day that was.
• The return is measured from the run's starting cash. The comparison is SPY, a fund that tracks the S&P 500, measured from the market day before the run's first trade, by its price alone, without dividends.
• Money is counted in whole cents, so the figures add up exactly rather than drifting by fractions.

Prices come from Alpaca's market data. Live prices are licensed for Niko's own use, so visitors never see them: this site shows performance as of the latest close, worked out from the trades, and never a current price.

• There are no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind, and nothing on these pages is loaded from another website.
• Visitors get no cookies. The only cookie this site sets is the one that keeps a signed-in account signed in, and sign-ups are closed, so a visitor can't have one.
• One setting, light or dark, is kept in your own browser so the page looks the way you left it. It is never sent anywhere.
• The site is hosted by Vercel, which sees each request as any web host does, under its own privacy policy. Nothing you do here is stored by this site.

The design comes from Niko's Notes. Market data from Alpaca.