Rebalancing

Portfolio rebalancing software that hands you the trades

Most portfolio tools stop at the diagnosis: here is your allocation, here is your drift, good luck. The arithmetic that turns "you're overweight equities" into "sell exactly this much of exactly this fund, in this account" is the part you end up doing in a spreadsheet at 11pm. RangefinderInvest is built to do that part.

The model the whole app runs on

A target model is a named allocation. It holds slices — asset-class parts, each with a target weight — and each slice names the actual ticker or tickers that fill it, with a split when more than one does. The slice editor shows how much of your 100% budget is left as you type, and flags a model as Valid or Review depending on whether it totals exactly 100%.

That indirection is what makes the rest work. Because each slice names its own funds per brokerage, one "U.S. Large Blend" target becomes a Fidelity mutual fund order in your IRA and a Schwab ETF order in your taxable account — automatically, without you maintaining two parallel spreadsheets.

Models also carry effective-dated versions. When you change your allocation the old weights stay on record, so the current version drives today's trades while historical backtests still apply the weights that were actually in force on each date.

What the order ticket actually contains

For every account in rebalancing, every slice and every ticker, it computes the whole chain — target % → current % → % off target → target $ → current $ → drift $ → action → order — and classifies each line Add, Reduce, Close, or Hold. Anything inside your drift threshold is a Hold, so noise doesn't generate churn, and the threshold is yours to set.

The part that saves the spreadsheet work is the order column being brokerage-aware: mutual funds are dollar-traded, so you get "Add $4,426 FXNAX"; ETFs are share-traded, so the equivalent Schwab order comes out in whole shares. It also does the things you'd otherwise forget — it flags holdings that aren't in your model at all as Close rows, counts your uninvested core cash as investable dollars, and lets you filter by action and account.

Rebalancing around a withdrawal or a contribution

Rebalancing in the abstract is the easy case. The real one is "I need $40,000 out this year" — and there the trades that raise the cash and the trades that fix the drift should be the same trades. Tell it the flow and it re-sizes every target against the post-flow value, with:

• A strategy selector — proportional, trim-overweight-first, preserve-tax-lots.
• Tax-aware account sequencing — taxable first, then tax-deferred, Roth last, respecting each account's own "allow withdrawals" flag.
• Lot-level detail — per-lot gain and loss, a HIFO / FIFO / specific-ID lot method, the short- versus long-term split, wash-sale flags, and an estimated tax bill on the sale.
• Now / Defer guidance from a reserve floor and an equity-drawdown band, so it nudges you to spend cash rather than sell into a dip.

It models the accounts you actually have

A household is not one account, and the tax treatment is not a footnote — it's what decides which shares you should sell. Every account carries its institution and type (brokerage, traditional IRA, Roth, rollover, 401(k), HSA, 529), a tax treatment derived from that type and overridable, its own target model, the owner's birth year for RMD timing, and toggles for whether it participates in rebalancing and whether withdrawals may come from it.

Holdings get in one of two ways: hand-enter your monthly statement, or import a Schwab or Fidelity CSV. Go the transaction route and your share counts, cost basis, realized and unrealized gains and income are all derived from the ledger rather than maintained by hand, with uninvested cash tracked as its own per-account ledger. Imports detect the broker, preview the parsed rows, flag unknown tickers, and de-duplicate so re-importing the same file is safe. If your broker's share count ever disagrees with the ledger, Reconcile writes the exact adjusting trade.

Where it fits, and where it doesn't

Against the alternatives

Compared against the general shape of free aggregating dashboards as a category, not against any one product's current feature list — those change without telling us. Verify specifics with each vendor. Four rows there go against us on purpose.

Your portfolio never leaves your machine

Everything — accounts, holdings, transactions, cost basis, models and plans — lives in one SQLite database file on your computer. You can see where it is, move it to a synced folder or an external drive, and it backs itself up automatically on launch with a keep-count you set. There's no account to create and no server holding a copy, which is why there is also no aggregator holding your brokerage credentials: the app never asks for them because it never connects to your broker.

Rather than claim zero network activity, here are the only two outbound requests it makes: the market-data lookups you configure, which carry ticker symbols and date ranges and nothing about your holdings, and a once-a-day update check carrying the app's version, the operating system, and — once in an install's life — a flag that the install is new. Both have off switches, and Microsoft Store installs skip the update check entirely. The privacy policy lists both request types field by field.

Questions

Schwab is a trademark of Charles Schwab & Co., Inc.; Fidelity is a trademark of FMR LLC. Kalman Software LLC is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by either firm; their names appear only to identify the CSV formats RangefinderInvest can read, and those formats are theirs to change. Tickers and dollar amounts named on this page are illustrations drawn from the sample portfolio that ships with the app — not recommendations, and not figures from any real account. RangefinderInvest is software, not an investment adviser: it does not provide investment advice, and you place every trade yourself.

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