1. Home of PRBA: Sell this, Buy That! - mlb3820/prba GitHub Wiki

Welcome to the PRBA wiki! This is the home of the Portfolio Re Balancing App, a tool that helps you decide when and what to buy and sell (among your existing holdings, this is not a crystal ball!) to keep your portfolio on target. This is truly a set it and forget it (until you are alerted to the need to make a change that is) approach to passive, long term investment management.

This idea was conceived originally as a means of simplifying the when and how of re-balancing my investment portfolio. I happen to be using the Permanent Portfolio approach to low cost passive investing, to manage the funds I cannot afford to lose. By passive investing I mean this is not a day trader approach. The only active trading that occurs is on an annual or as needed basis, when the investment bands are breached which indicate when it is time to sell and buy asset classes. At those times I want this app to do the math for me, telling me which investments and how many shares to sell, plus which investments and how many shares to buy in order to bring the portfolio back into balance.

If the defined bands are breached, the app will send me an email alert containing the changes to make. Otherwise I will simply open the app annually (on my birthday) and request the re-balance notice manually.

The big mojo here is in knowing WHEN to sell. You want to sell high and buy low right? But just when is an asset high or low. As Einstein might say, "it's all relative". "Relative to what?" you asks, "to when YOU boughts it" I says. At the moment you buy an asset, you draw the proverbial line in the sand for you, and nobody but you. You know that an asset is worth more or less to you today than last quarter when you bought it. Your brokerage tools will tell you that. What your brokerage tools wont tell you is when you should sell it and how much of it to sell. That's where asset allocations come in.

PRB lets you decide which holdings to combine together into an "asset class" and lets you decide the target allocation of your overall portfolio for that asset class, and then, its tells you when your asset is worth enough to you to sell it and, exactly how much to sell.