Why Trade Thesis exists

The problem

Most retail investing tools are portfolio trackers. They tell you what you own and what it is worth today. They do not help with the part that actually determines returns: deciding what to buy, recording why, and finding out afterwards whether the reasoning held up.

So that work ends up in spreadsheets, browser tabs, and memory. Research gets repeated. Positions outlive the reasoning behind them. And the tax consequences of closing one only become clear after the fact, when nothing can be done about them.

The approach

Trade Thesis is built around a loop rather than a dashboard: form a hypothesis, execute, review the outcome, learn from it. Each part of the product serves a stage of that loop — the review log for screening, research notes for evidence, hypotheses for the thesis itself, trade import for what actually happened, and the CGT calculator for the tax side of closing a position.

The software assists the process; it does not make the decisions. There is no automated trading, no signal service, and no algorithm telling you what to buy. The judgment stays with the investor — the platform's job is to make sure the reasoning behind that judgment is written down, retrievable, and honestly reviewed.

Why ASX only

This is a deliberate constraint, not a limitation waiting to be lifted. Australian market data is harder to get and Australian tax rules are specific enough that generic international tools handle them badly — particularly the 50% CGT (Capital Gains Tax) discount and FIFO (First In, First Out) parcel accounting. Those barriers are precisely what makes a platform that solves them properly worth using. Depth in one market beats shallow coverage of many.

Built in the open

Trade Thesis is in active development and is currently free while in beta. What has shipped is listed in the changelog, what is coming is on the roadmap, and the thinking behind the process is written up on the blog. Feedback from people actually using it shapes what gets built next.