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.