The Millennial Guide is a personal project — an investing app I'm building because I wanted one that explained itself. There's no team. There's no Series A. There's me, a decade and change of doing this professionally, and a few AI agents I treat like extremely literal-minded interns.
I'm Reuben. For the last decade-plus I've been running money at large banks and at two sovereign wealth funds — the kind of job where the spreadsheets are huge and the language is huger. The numbers we ran for institutional clients weren't more sophisticated than what an ordinary person ought to be running for themselves. They were just packaged better.
Most investing apps built for the rest of us picked one of two playbooks: dumb the product down to a cartoon and gamify the trades, or copy the bank UI and hope nobody notices the 1.7% fee. Neither helped me, and I do this for a living. So in 2026 I started building the thing I'd actually want to use — a calm, honest portfolio app that explains itself, in plain English, with the same logic as the institutional desk.
This isn't a company. I'm not a licensed financial advisor (to you). I'm not regulated by anyone with a three-letter acronym. The math, charts, and portfolios you see here are real — I run them for myself — but right now The Millennial Guide is a project, not a product. If it grows up into a regulated platform, you'll hear it from me first, and it'll come with the boring acronyms attached.
In the meantime: you're free to look around, follow along, and use any idea you find useful. Just don't mistake this for advice — yours or anyone else's.
A 1% fee over thirty years is roughly a third of your retirement. When this becomes a real product, the fee will be flat and posted on the pricing page in dollars, not basis points. If I ever raise it, you'll hear it from me first, in plain English.
Markets bounce around. That's the rent for the long-term return. The real risk is buying high, panicking low, paying tax for the privilege, and never recovering. A good app keeps that from happening — gently, with reminders rather than alarms.
The portfolio should be boring. The assistant shouldn't be. I use AI heavily where it actually helps — drafting tax-loss harvesting plans, summarising a year, catching the questions you didn't know to ask, and (frankly) writing half of this codebase. I don't use it to pick stocks. Nobody can.
Every screen, every email, every prospectus excerpt. If a sentence has more than one piece of jargon, I rewrite it. If I can't rewrite it, I link the definition in-line. If you find one I missed, there's a button on every page — or you can just email me.
It's not a brokerage where you day-trade meme stocks. It's not a robo-advisor that puts you in five ETFs and bills 0.25% to look the other way. It's not a private bank where the minimums imply you should know who to call. And right now it isn't a regulated platform either — it's me, scratching an itch, in public.
Two reasons. One: I think the gap between "what institutional investors know" and "what ordinary investors can see" is mostly artificial, and shrinking it sounds like a fun decade-long problem. Two: AI is finally good enough that one person can build a credible version of this in a reasonable time, and I'd rather find out what's possible than wait for somebody else to.
If you want to follow along — bugs, decisions, half-baked ideas about rebalancing schedules — a sign-up is coming; for now, just stick around. I'll be honest if it amounts to nothing.
Take a look around. Tell me what's broken.
Try the prototype It's a project, not a product. Treat anything you see here as a sketch, not advice.