Today, I am inviting readers of Hacker News to sign up for Realized.

To start using Realized now, sign up at http://realized-app.com. If you have a few minutes, check out the product tour.

What is Realized?

Realized is a web app for investors who want to get higher returns by lowering their investment costs. And the biggest costs are not commissions or management fees, but rather capital gains tax.

If you are an individual investor or financial advisor, you may have already found it surprisingly difficult to manage your stock portfolio on the web. Most financial web sites are devoted to what might be called the buy side of investing. Financial analysts love to recommend stocks. Buying is easy and nearly cost free, with online brokerages and low commissions. Everybody has thousands of choices: stocks, ETFs and mutual funds.

The sell side is what generates the real costs

Almost no one provides guidance about when and what to sell from your portfolio. But selling is specific to only those securities that you already hold. Selling also generates taxable capital gains. Selling the wrong security at the wrong time can have a catastrophic effect on your rate of return.

Managing a portfolio well requires real discipline with regard to selling securities.

Forget about timing the market: focus on timing your portfolio

By netting out gains and losses, most investors can sharply lower their tax burden. Turning unrealized into actual losses allows for other sales to become literally tax free.

Most investment finance software concentrates on calculating capital gains tax at the end of the year. You find out where you stand after the fact. By that time, it may be too late to offset gains with losses. You are stuck with the capital gains tax that might have been avoided.

Realized aims to change things.

Individual investors and financial advisors need a tool that helps them avoid making trades that cost dearly. Realized does just that, making stock investing and capital gains tax simple and straightforward, year-round.

Yesterday we launched Realized-app.com in a no cost, preview phase.

As previously mentioned, Realized-app began as a simple Ruby on Rails demonstration project. Quickly the proof of concept became a viable app, due mainly to the developer productivity that Rails provides.

For a preview of its capabilities, check out the product tour.

With nearly 60 models in this release, Realized-app represents a relatively modest Rails app. For those developers who would like to explore the app, you are welcome to sign up for free and try it.

Squarespace has an extensive user manual. Beginning users can easily find a Getting Started section. A searchable set of how-to articles and FAQ answer questions from more experienced users.

When we explored alternative platforms for Realized-app support, we wanted to emulate Squarespace as a starting point. We anticipated that a typical need for support might pass through three stages:

• Reading the manual
• Searching the forums for similar issues
• Asking a question via email

One aspect of Tender stood out from the other SaaS providers. It provides a searchable knowledge base to ‘Help your customers help themselves’. After seeing that feature, other platforms seemed to be just combinations of forums and email managers.

In late April, we added screenshots to the Realized-app product tour. Our design drew upon an idea we saw at AgileZen.com, where clicking a thumbnail expands into a larger screenshot lightbox.

The Realized-app already makes use of jQuery, mainly for client-side processing of stock ticker choices. To animate our screenshots, we adopted the jQuery plugin that AgileZen uses, Fancybox. Our configuration:

$(document).ready(function() {

  $(".fancybox > a").fancybox({

    'hideOnContentClick':true,

    'titleShow':false,

    'transitionIn':'elastic',

    'transitionOut':'elastic',

    'speedIn':800,

    'speedOut':800,

    'easingIn':'easeInOutExpo',

    'easingOut':'easeInOutExpo'

    . . .

One interesting aspect of configuring Fancybox is its support of the Easing plugin to control the transitions. Easing controls how an animation progresses over time by varying its acceleration, giving each transition a more natural effect.

The stock of ABC (AmerisourceBergen Corp) split 2 for 1 on June 15, 2009. The split doubled the number of shares that each of the thousands of ABC stockholders held. For those tracking their investments with Quicken, each would then need to enter a transaction to record the stock split.

Having each of our customers enter the same publicly available information about a stock split seems like a missed opportunity. If Realized-app stored the stock split once, then why should it ever need to be entered again?

Realized automatically applies stock splits

As an example, two investors have purchased ABC stock. The first bought 100 shares on March 1, 2009 (before the stock split). The second bought 200 shares last week. Today, each holds 200 shares.

How does the share quantity of the first investor get adjusted for the split? The Realized-app already stores stock split info. Rather than asking the first investor to record the stock split, the Realized-app applies the stock split to that holding during the tax lot setup process.

Better usability

Because a web app uses a common data store, it can share public information among individual accounts. By reusing the specifics about a stock split among all of our users, Realized-app has removed one source of redundant or erroneous data input. In effect, we have improved the usability by removing the functionality of recording a stock split.