A year ago, Paul Graham listed a few Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund.

#21: “Finance software for individuals and small businesses. Intuit seems ripe for picking off. The difficulty is that they’ve got data connections with all the banks. That’s hard for a small startup to match. But if you can start in a neighboring area and gradually expand into their territory, you could displace them.”

We all watched as Mint entered that space. But both Quicken and Mint fall short when it comes to handling stock investments. Their data connections with financial institutions provide real convenience, but pose issues of security and privacy.

The web is full of personal finance sites with ideas about buying stock. Few address the problem of selling stock from a portfolio to minimize realized capital gains and maintain balanced diversification. And even fewer calculate capital gains and support the preparation of Schedule D.

To maintain privacy, rather than relying on a direct import from each broker, Realized-app uses the FasterCSV gem to import trade history from a .csv history file.

Realized-app began as a Ruby on Rails demonstration project. Time will tell whether security and privacy trump convenience.

Welcome to our blog. We have been working for nearly five months to create a simple and effective stock portfolio management tool.

Much of our energy this year has been devoted to building our web app, Realized-app. Taking a few hours to look into a blog architecture was a welcome change in direction. Very quickly we settled on Jekyll for use as a blog generator.

Jekyll is written in Ruby. Because of that, we are confident that if our needs outgrow Jekyll, we should be able to bolt something on without too much difficulty. One of its early proponents, Henrik Nyh did just that by adding support for Haml. Using Haml allowed us to streamline the design of our blog archive page.

Look for the launch of the Realized-app blog soon, also to be built on Jekyll.