Field Notes
Building a benchmark set that matches how you hold
· Two or three honest comparison lines beat a single index that never resembled your bag.
A holder with sixty percent in two large coins and a long tail of experiments should not measure the whole bag against a single majored index. The weekly snapshot will look “wrong” every time the long tail moves, and the conversation turns defensive.
We usually draft a primary line that mirrors the core holdings, a secondary line for the experimental sleeve, and — when cash or stablecoins are material — a simple cash reference so yield and idle balances do not masquerade as alpha.
The desktop performance monitor stores those identifiers with the snapshot. Next Sunday, the export already knows which lines to pull. The human work is deciding, once a quarter or after a major rebalance, whether the set still describes the portfolio you actually keep.