About The Average Guy Portfolio — Educational Investing Since 2016

Who Is The Average Guy?

The Average Guy is not a professional investor, financial advisor, or Wall Street insider. He's a regular person who decided to take control of his financial future by learning to invest in the stock market. With no formal training in finance and no special access to investment insights, he started with $10,000 in 2016 and has been building a diversified investment portfolio ever since.

The Average Guy represents millions of everyday people who want to grow their wealth but don't know where to start. This project exists to prove a simple truth: with discipline, patience, and a sound strategy, regular people can build substantial wealth through the stock market.

    This project is entirely educational. It documents one person's actual investment decisions and real-money trades. It is not a recommendation service, not financial advice, and not a trading signal. Visitors are encouraged to do their own research and consult with licensed financial advisors before making investment decisions.
  

How It Started: 2016

In 2016, the Average Guy opened a brokerage account at Charles Schwab with $10,000. This wasn't millions—it was money saved from a regular job. The goal was simple: invest consistently, learn from real market experiences, and track every single trade and holding transparently.

Unlike many investment blogs and newsletters that hide losses, cherry-pick winners, or use hindsight bias to retell their stories, this portfolio is completely transparent. Every trade is documented. Every loss is visible. Every gain is earned. This transparency is what makes the Average Guy Portfolio valuable as an educational tool.

The portfolio has experienced every type of market condition: bull markets, bear markets, corrections, rallies, sector rotations, and geopolitical shocks. The data shows what it actually feels like to invest through different market environments—not what textbooks say you should do, but what one person actually did.

The Philosophy Behind The Strategy

The Average Guy's investment approach is rooted in a few core principles:

Buy and hold (with tactical adjustments). The strategy favors long-term ownership over frequent trading. Most positions are held for years, with occasional rebalancing and tactical moves based on market conditions and changing life circumstances.
Diversification matters. The portfolio is diversified across asset classes (stocks, ETFs, some cash), sectors (technology, healthcare, consumer, industrials, energy), and market caps (large-cap indexes, mid-caps, small-caps via individual stocks).
Focus on quality companies. When picking individual stocks, emphasis is placed on companies with strong fundamentals, competitive advantages, and clear business models. Companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA appear in the portfolio because of their market position and growth potential.
Core-satellite approach. The portfolio maintains a "core" of broad index funds (VTI, VTSAX) for stable, diversified returns, while allocating a smaller portion to individual stocks and sector ETFs for targeted exposure and learning.

The Tech Stack Behind Transparency

This website uses a modern tech stack to keep portfolio data accurate and up-to-date:

Charles Schwab API. Real holdings, prices, and account values are pulled directly from the user's actual Charles Schwab brokerage account via their official API. No manual updates, no guessing—the data is live.
Vercel deployment. The site is hosted on Vercel, a platform optimized for high performance and automatic scaling. This ensures the site loads fast and stays responsive even during heavy market volatility when site traffic spikes.
Dashboard UI. The frontend is built as a modern single-page application with real-time charts, performance metrics, and interactive portfolio analysis tools. All data updates automatically throughout the trading day.

This technical infrastructure exists for one reason: to make the portfolio data trustworthy. When you see holdings and prices on this site, they're not static screenshots or delayed reports—they're live data from the actual brokerage account.

What This Site Is NOT

It's important to be clear about the boundaries of this project:

    Not financial advice. Nothing on this site should be construed as a recommendation to buy or sell any security. The holdings shown are one person's choices, not investment recommendations.
Not a trading signal service. This is not a system to follow trades or copy positions. It is purely educational documentation.
Not performance forecasting. Past performance is documented here, but future returns are unknown. Market conditions, company prospects, and macroeconomic factors change constantly.
Not a licensed financial service. The Average Guy is not a registered investment advisor, broker, or financial professional. The portfolio is tracked and maintained purely for educational transparency.
Not guaranteed to work for you. What worked in this portfolio may not work in yours. Individual risk tolerance, time horizon, financial goals, and market conditions vary greatly between investors.

  

The Motivation: Why This Site Exists

Most investment information falls into two extremes: either overly simplistic (buy index funds and forget it) or overly complex (follow these 47 technical indicators). The Average Guy Portfolio exists in the middle ground, showing what a real person actually does.

The motivation behind this project is to demystify investing and demonstrate that you don't need to be a genius, don't need insider information, and don't need a huge amount of capital to build wealth. With education, discipline, and patience, ordinary people can participate in the wealth-building potential of the stock market.

Portfolio Started

2016

Initial Capital

$10K

Years of Data

Holdings Tracked

20+

Learning Through Market Cycles

Since 2016, the Average Guy's portfolio has experienced dramatic swings: from the bull market of 2017 (up 37.96%) to the crash of 2022 (down 47.21%) to the recovery of 2023 (up 87.75%). Each of these cycles teaches different lessons about investing: the importance of staying invested during downturns, the power of diversification, the dangers of over-concentration, and the long-term rewards of patience.

This is why the portfolio is transparent: so you can learn from both the wins and the losses. The losses are often more instructive than the wins.

Visit The Live Portfolio

To see the current holdings, performance metrics, and real-time data from the Average Guy's portfolio, visit the main portfolio dashboard. For details on the specific investment strategy and methodology, see the Strategy & Methodology page.