The story
Built on a night watch
Sentryfolio wasn't designed in a boardroom. It was built for one real portfolio, by someone who was tired of watching it the hard way.
Where it began
The problem with worry
Anyone who holds shares knows the feeling. A stock you believe in slips while you're at work. A dividend payer you'd love to own goes on sale the week you're not looking. Prices move at all hours, in several currencies, across more than one broker, and the person expected to keep watch over all of it has a life to live.
The trackers on offer didn't help so much as blur. They rounded history into averages, nagged about everything and nothing, and (worst of all) kept sliding opinions across the table: stars, scores, "people also bought". The one thing an investor with their own convictions doesn't need is somebody else's.
So Sentryfolio was built to do something narrower, and to do it exactly: stand watch. Remember every purchase at the price it truly cost. Measure every closing price against numbers the owner chose. Say something only when one of those numbers is met, and say it once, calmly, in the morning.
The name
Why a beacon?
A sentry doesn't trade. A sentry doesn't have views on where the enemy ought to be. A sentry watches the ground you told it to watch and reports what happened: reliably, unemotionally, every single day. That seemed the right character for software minding a portfolio, and the gold beacon became its mark: a watchtower with the light kept lit.
The look followed from the temperament: charcoal and gold, more old-money private bank than fintech app. The gold is jewellery, not wallpaper. The numbers keep still until they have something to say.
The heartbeat rule holds the whole thing to account. The morning report arrives every day, even when nothing happened, so a missing report can never be mistaken for a quiet one.
In the owner's words
I have traded for more than thirty years, across seven different brokers, and for most of that time my system for keeping watch was logging in now and again and trying to remember. It failed me more than once. The failure that stung most was Vodafone. I had planned for months to sell if it reached £1.40. Work got busy, I stopped looking, and when I next opened the account it was at 80p. I waited nearly three years for it to come back. I did not need advice. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I needed something that never stops watching the numbers I care about and tells me when one of them is met. So I built it.
— Phil, the operator
What it refuses to be
Not a tipster
No buy, no sell, no recommend, no scores out of ten. Sentryfolio reports distances between prices and the numbers you chose. What to do about them is yours alone.
Not a noise machine
One signal, then quiet until the mathematics genuinely resets. A dramatic market never becomes a dramatic phone.
Not an averager
Your history is kept exact: every purchase its own record at its own price, forever. Nothing is rounded away to make the sums easier.
One portfolio at a time
Sentryfolio is in private beta, growing deliberately. Each new portfolio gets its broker formats built in personally.