Why I Built AlphaLens

Open your Alpaca or IBKR dashboard right now. You'll see a number — your total return, your P&L for the day, maybe a simple equity graph. What you won't see is whether that number is any good.

That's the problem AlphaLens was built to solve.

The Question Your Broker Won't Answer

You're up 18% this year. Is that good?

It depends. The S&P 500 might be up 22%. If it is, you underperformed by 4 percentage points while taking on the risk of picking individual stocks. Or the market might be down 5% — in which case you're exceptional.

Your broker doesn't tell you this. It gives you your absolute return and leaves the rest to you. That's fine if you're a passive investor in an index fund. It's not fine if you're actively managing a portfolio and trying to understand whether you have skill or just luck and market beta.

The Gap Between Retail and Professional

Every hedge fund, prop desk, and serious family office runs the same core analytics:

• Sharpe ratio — how much return are you generating per unit of volatility you're absorbing?
• Max drawdown — what's the worst peak-to-trough decline your portfolio has experienced?
• Time-weighted return — what's your actual return, stripped of the distortion from deposits and withdrawals?
• Benchmark alpha — are you beating a passive index fund, and by how much, after risk adjustment?

These aren't exotic metrics. They're the minimum viable analytics for understanding whether a strategy is working. Professional money managers use them every day. Retail traders — even sophisticated ones running algorithmic strategies on Alpaca — largely don't have access to them in a form that's easy to consume.

Bloomberg Terminal costs $25,000 a year. Portfolio analytics suites cost thousands more. The result: a massive asymmetry between what institutions know about their performance and what retail traders know about theirs.

What AlphaLens Gives You

AlphaLens connects to your broker accounts and computes the same analytics that professionals use, displayed in a terminal-style dashboard that updates in real time.

Equity curve vs. benchmark — your portfolio's return plotted directly against SPY (or QQQ, or any index you choose), so you can see at a glance whether you're generating alpha or just riding the market.

Drawdown chart — not just the number, but the shape: when your worst drawdowns happened, how long they lasted, and how long recovery took.

Monthly returns heatmap — a color-coded grid of every month's return, showing your seasonal patterns at a glance. Are you consistently losing in Q4? The heatmap shows it.

Risk metrics panel — Sharpe ratio, Sortino ratio, Calmar ratio, PSR, and more, calculated from your actual return history with proper annualization.

Round-trip trade analysis — every closed position, entry to exit, with the P&L, holding period, and contribution to overall returns. The data your broker has but doesn't show you.

Live positions treemap — your current holdings sized by position weight, colored by today's performance. One glance tells you where your risk is concentrated.

Multi-Broker From Day One

Most serious retail traders don't use a single account. You might run a momentum strategy on Alpaca and a dividend portfolio on IBKR. You might have a taxable account at one broker and a tax-advantaged account at another. Analyzing them separately means you never see the full picture.

AlphaLens connects to both Alpaca and Interactive Brokers simultaneously. It merges your positions, orders, and return history into a single unified view — with the math done correctly so that broker differences in how they report performance don't skew the results.

Where It's Going

The current version is focused on analytics — understanding what's happened. The next phase is about acting on it: alerts when drawdown thresholds are crossed, strategy tagging to isolate performance by thesis, and support for additional brokers.

The goal is a platform where a retail trader has the same quality of information about their portfolio that a professional fund manager does. Not a simplified version. The real thing.

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If you're trading on Alpaca or Interactive Brokers and you want to understand your performance rather than just see it, get started for free. Connect takes under two minutes.