Your broker knows what you own.
It doesn’t know what you meant.
Write down the proportions you intended, and why. We keep every version, we never overwrite one, and we give it back to you later — when you have forgotten writing it, and it is worth reading.
Free, and not a trial. No card, no password.
On 12 March 2024, about a holding of yours, you wrote:
Core utility exposure, bought for the income floor. I won’t let it past 8% because of regulatory risk.
You will have forgotten writing that. It is the part nobody else keeps, and the part you will want in front of you on the day it stops being obvious.
Nobody can simply stop looking.
Investors who leave their holdings alone tend to keep more of what those holdings earn. Looking is what erodes it: you check, something is down, and sitting still begins to feel like negligence.
So everyone sensible in this field arrives at the same counsel — look less. Which is right, and nearly useless, because it does nothing about the question that made you look in the first place. What if something has happened that I would want to know about?
Willpower is no answer to that. On a ship, nobody sleeps because the sea is safe. They sleep because someone has the watch, and that person has written instructions about what is worth waking them for.
You write the instructions. We keep watch. Most months we write to say that nothing has moved, and that sentence is the product.
Who this is for
Anyone who owns things they mean to keep, and would rather not spend their evenings watching them. One holding or fifty, one account or six.
- You decide for yourself. — nobody is managing this for you, and you would rather it stayed that way.
- You meant something by it. — proportions you intended to hold, and reasons you held them. We keep the plan; we do not supply one.
- You catch yourself checking. — and you would like a reason to stop, rather than another screen that rewards it.
Accounts in more than one place — a taxable account, an IRA, an old 401(k) — make one part of this worth more, because no broker will ever show you a competitor’s. But the plan, the watching and the letters work the same with one.
Three things
You bring two of them. We do the third.
Where this stands today, so you are not surprised: only the first one exists. The second and third need a paid connection to your brokerage, and we have not built them. They are described here because they are the shape of the idea, not because they are coming soon — what it costs explains why, and what would change it.
You write your record.
The proportions you intended, the band you will tolerate, and what would change your mind. Nothing you write is ever overwritten — a new version keeps the old one, so the record shows how your thinking moved.
You connect your accounts.
Every account in one place, which no broker will do for you. Real cost basis and real dividend history, read from your accounts rather than typed. Income by year, yield on cost, what your income depends on.
We keep watch.
We check the closing prices against the bands you set. If something you flagged moves outside one, you hear about it the same evening — led by what you wrote, not by the number. Once a month otherwise, usually to say nothing has moved.
Two kinds of letter, and one of them is usually empty.
When something crosses a line you drew, we say so that evening. Once, for that move — not again the next day because it is still across.
And once a month, whether or not anything happened. That one exists so silence never has to be interpreted: if nothing has moved, we tell you nothing has moved.
In March 2024 you wrote about this holding:
Core utility exposure, bought for the income floor. I won’t let it past 8% because of regulatory risk.
| Holding | Target | Band | Now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Utilities sleeve | 6.0% | 4.5–7.5% | 8.4% |
| Consumer staples | 12.0% | 9.0–15.0% | 11.6% |
| Healthcare | 15.0% | 11.3–18.8% | 14.2% |
Outside its band since 4 March. Everything else is inside.
What we hold, and what we don’t.
We do not need your name, your account numbers, or your balances to do any of this. There is no password to steal, because there isn’t one — you sign in with a link. When we connect to a broker it is read-only, and it can never place an instruction of any kind.
You can take everything you have written out in one file, or delete the account and everything in it, without asking us.
- No stock picks. — we never name a holding you don’t already own.
- No advice. — we tell you what you said, and what changed.
- No red and green. — that’s the color language of trading.
- No live prices. — nothing to check during the day.
- No ads, no broker money. — you’re the only one who pays us.
Why TeakDeck
A teak deck is the part of a ship you stand on. Not the thing you look at — the thing you look from. It stays level while the sea does what the sea does, and a well-laid teak deck will outlast the person who commissioned it.
The reason we chose it is what teak asks of you. A teak deck is ruined by maintenance. Don’t varnish it, don’t pressure-wash it, don’t scrub it back to the honey color it had when new. Left alone it silvers, hardens and holds. Fussed over, it wears away — every cleaning takes more of the wood than the weather ever would.
Interference is what does the damage. That is most of what we think about investing, and it turned out somebody had already made it into a floor.
Nothing.
There is no paid plan, no card, and nothing to cancel. Your record is yours, you can take it out in one file whenever you like, and you can delete it without asking us.
We can say that plainly because of what TeakDeck doesn’t do. It never connects to your brokerage, so it costs us almost nothing to run, and there is no bill to pass on to you.
The part that isn’t built
Watching your holdings against the bands you set — and writing to you the evening one moves — needs a daily price for everything you own. That means a paid connection to your accounts, which means charging for it, which is a different kind of undertaking than this is today.
We haven’t built it, and we won’t until we know somebody wants it. If that is the part you came for, say so — it is the only thing that would change the answer.
There will be a way to say so from inside your record. It is not built yet either — and no payment would ever follow without you deciding to.
Start with one holding.
The one you would find hardest to explain to someone else. That is usually the one worth writing down.
No card for the record. Nothing to cancel.