Getting started

Invites

Registration is invite-gated. There is no open sign-up form waiting behind the landing page: an account exists because somebody on the team minted a code for it, which is how the beta stays small enough that every question gets an answer.

A code arrives as a link — /register?code=… — with the code already filled in. Redeeming it creates your account in the same transaction that spends the code, so a single-use code cannot be claimed twice even by two sign-ups racing each other. Codes carry a use count and an expiry date; an expired or exhausted one is refused with a plain message rather than a silent failure.

If you do not have a code, ask for one and say roughly what you hold and where it lives. That last part matters: Bitnora imports Interactive Brokers today, and knowing what else people hold is how the next integration gets chosen.

Where your investments live

The first screen after sign-up asks one question — where does your money actually sit — and offers three answers. Pick the one that matches most of it. You can add the others afterwards; nothing here is a one-way door.

Starting from the demo book

An empty portfolio is a bad place to learn what a portfolio tool does. The paper step therefore offers to copy the public demo book into a practice portfolio of your own, so you have something to sell, rebalance, and review from the first minute.

1. Step 01

   Open the paper step

   Either choose “Practice with paper money” in the wizard, or arrive from the demo page — a sign-up that starts there opens the wizard on the paper branch with the demo card already highlighted.

2. Step 02

   Use the demo portfolio

   The card lists the demo book’s value and its largest holdings before you commit to anything, and says whether it brings portfolio targets with it.

3. Step 03

   Start trading it

   You get the demo’s positions, its cash, and a copy of its targets, which belong to you and can be edited freely. The original demo book is untouched.

Each position is copied at its latest stored close and that same price becomes its cost basis, so the fork arrives as an in-kind contribution rather than as a day-one windfall. If any ticker in the demo has no stored price, the whole copy is refused instead of being completed with an invented one.

What the dashboard shows first

The dashboard unlocks once there is something real to show: a completed IBKR import, or any other portfolio that holds at least one position. An abandoned, empty portfolio does not count — landing on a zero dashboard with no obvious next action is worse than staying in the wizard.

On the first visit it is deliberately not a wall of charts. What you see, in order:

• Net worth and the day’s change, with the allocation breakdown and your largest positions.
• A next-step card — one action at a time, chosen from what your account is actually missing, not a generic checklist.
• A history-rebuild card, if an IBKR backfill is still running. It occupies the chart slot so an incomplete chart is never mistaken for a flat one.
• Broker trust chips, when a reconciliation run has something to say about how your imported holdings compare against the broker’s own report.
• Drift alerts, once targets exist to drift away from.

The performance chart needs history, and history takes a moment to arrive. A manual portfolio’s chart starts the day you add it unless you backdate the purchases; an IBKR portfolio’s chart fills in as the backfill works backwards. Until then the chart slot says which of those it is waiting on.

Base currency

Set once in settings. Every figure on the dashboard, the income page, and the review is converted into it from stored daily rates.

Prices

Refreshed on a nightly schedule, with a live quote fetched at the moment a paper trade is submitted.

Next: write your targets down

Set target weights and the dashboard starts measuring the gap — targets and rebalancing.

Next: get it read back

Have the whole book assessed and scored — AI reviews.