Plain answers before the model asks for trust.

The name comes from a sports concept: a starting lineup. The market has hundreds of eligible players, but Starting Index is trying to identify the strongest names to put on the field for the next monthly window. The process is rules-based and starts from a broad index universe, but the published profiles are selective by design.

Starting Index is designed to be used as a published model portfolio family, not as personalized financial advice. Each month, subscribers can review the Core, Balanced, and Growth target profiles, benchmark comparison, and supporting reports before deciding whether any profile fits their own account, risk tolerance, tax situation, and investment plan.

Internally, we use the platform as a disciplined monthly rebalance framework: review the published profiles, compare them against current holdings, create an order sheet, and rebalance only after checking account-specific constraints like cash availability, taxes, settlement rules, and position size.

Subscribers can use the same workflow themselves, or share the model and order sheet with a financial advisor, tax professional, or broker.

They are three ways to use the same monthly ranking. Core uses the top 20 names with capped rank-weighting for the broadest exposure. Balanced uses the top 10 names with rank-weighting for more concentration. Growth uses the top 5 names with equal weights for the highest-conviction profile. All three hold selected S&P 500 names, but they are intentionally more concentrated than a broad-market index fund.

Starting Index cannot choose a profile for you because that depends on your goals, account type, risk tolerance, taxes, time horizon, and broader portfolio. A practical way to compare the profiles is to start with concentration: Core spreads exposure across more names, Balanced sits in the middle, and Growth is intentionally more concentrated. Subscribers can review the profile returns, drawdowns, current holdings, and order sheets before deciding what, if anything, fits their own process.

Monthly rebalancing is frequent enough to let leadership change, but slow enough to avoid turning the model family into a noisy day-trading system. It also creates a simple customer rhythm: one publication, one decision window, one clear record.

Monthly profiles are intended to be generated and published around 5:00pm ET on the final trading day of the month, once the month-end data is complete. The intended subscriber workflow is to review the publication, reports, and order sheet before deciding whether to act in the next trading session.

The operator's personal account workflow is intended to follow the same next-trading-session cadence after the model has been generated, timestamped, and published. That timing is disclosed because account-level implementation can still differ based on broker rules, cash availability, and account type.

Professional and Business subscribers can use API access to retrieve model publications in a more automated workflow. Starting Index still does not provide execution, custody, or personalized trading instructions.

Broker and account rules matter. Retirement, HSA, cash-only, or other restricted accounts may require sells to settle before new buys can be placed, and settlement timing can vary by broker, account type, and instrument.

The profile sizes come from the same research foundation, including a broad sweep of 4,350 configuration permutations. That sweep was used to understand the design space, not as proof by itself.

The profile family was also checked with perturbation tests, walk-forward validation, stress windows, and live publication records to reduce the risk of choosing a fragile result that only worked in one perfect backtest.

Twenty names gives the broadest exposure, 10 names creates a middle ground, and 5 names emphasizes the strongest ranks. The intent is to make concentration an explicit choice instead of hiding it inside one default portfolio.

The public performance page shows the Live Platform Record, which is the production path Starting Index has actually operated since inception. That record is useful because it shows the real implementation journey, but it should not be mistaken for a fixed Core, Balanced, or Growth profile record.

Profile-specific records are shown inside the subscriber model view. Before July 2026 those profile histories are reconstructed from saved monthly ranking history, and live profile tracking begins with the July 2026 publication.

The Core, Balanced, and Growth framework was formalized before July 2026 live profile tracking began. The pre-July profile histories shown on the site are reconstructed from saved monthly ranking history and publication artifacts, not from July outcomes. July profile-specific live results were not available when the profiles launched.

The Live Platform Record follows the live Starting Index production account, not a single profile backtest.

It began in February 2026 with a sector-balanced 25-stock equal-weight production sleeve, moved to 20 equal-weight names, then moved to a 20-stock rank-weighted sleeve that later became the Core profile.

For the July 2026 publication window, the original platform account moved to the more concentrated Growth profile while separate profile accounts began tracking Core, Balanced, and Growth. The chart shows that real production path. The profile records are separate. View the Platform Timeline.

Starting Index began as a live implementation of a simple research idea: use rules-based momentum to identify stronger names inside the S&P 500 and publish the allocation on a monthly rhythm.

After launch, we continued researching improvements the same way the original idea was tested: define the change, run it against historical data, compare it with the current process, and only adopt changes that materially improved the evidence without making the system harder to understand or operate.

That research led to refinements such as moving away from the initial sector-balanced approach, reducing the holdings count, adding rank-based weighting, and later separating the work into Core, Balanced, and Growth profiles.

By late June 2026, the profile family was formalized so each profile could be tracked clearly going forward. The Live Platform Record shows the actual production path. Profile records and research backtests are tracked separately.

Starting Index is currently founder-operated by Jerrod Finn, with feedback from investors, technologists, and finance professionals. It is not presented as a large committee-built institution, and that is intentional. The trust standard is not scale for its own sake; it is whether the model process, publication record, changelog, artifacts, and limitations are visible enough to be reviewed. As the platform matures, outside legal, compliance, data, and performance review are planned milestones.

No. The model is not built around forecasts, headlines, or discretionary opinions. It looks for measurable leadership inside a broad market universe and publishes the resulting allocation before the next holding period plays out.

SPY is a simple, familiar benchmark for broad U.S. equity exposure. Public performance pages use the benchmark basis identified in the published artifacts. The comparison is always shown over the same date range as the paired platform, profile, or research value so the excess return math stays grounded.

These are equity profiles, so drawdowns are part of the experience. The public evidence focuses on whether the profiles have historically earned enough excess return to justify that risk, and whether each risk profile is understandable versus SPY.

Current Stance is the model family's broad risk posture for the current publication window. It is separate from the Core, Balanced, and Growth concentration choices. The stance answers a simpler question first: is the process currently treating the market as healthy enough to publish equity exposure, or is it telling subscribers that the model is in a defensive posture?

A green Current Stance means the model is currently invested. In that state, the subscriber model page publishes the current Core, Balanced, and Growth equity profiles, and the order sheet can translate a chosen profile into target position sizes. It does not mean the market is risk-free or that every holding will rise; it only means the model's rules are currently allowing equity exposure.

A red Current Stance means the model is defensive. In that state, the model is signaling that broad market momentum has weakened enough that the normal equity profiles should not be treated as the active allocation for the current window. The purpose is to reduce exposure during environments where the rules say the market backdrop is not favorable.

When the model turns defensive, the publication should make that clear before a subscriber acts on the monthly allocation.

Internally, the defensive sleeve is implemented as cash or a cash-like Treasury-bill alternative such as BIL or an equivalent vehicle, depending on account type, broker availability, yield, and operational constraints.

Starting Index provides the model signal and publication context. Subscribers still need to account for their own broker rules, settlement, taxes, and whether a particular defensive vehicle is appropriate for them.

The model family is most naturally suited to tax-advantaged retirement accounts such as IRAs, Roth IRAs, and 401(k)-style accounts because monthly rebalancing can happen without creating current-year taxable gains inside the account. It can still be followed in a taxable brokerage account, but taxes become a real implementation cost and should be evaluated before using the model with non-retirement money.

Taxes are not ignored, but they depend heavily on the investor, account type, holding period, income, state, and broker records.

In taxable-account testing, the model has shown a meaningful tax drag, roughly in the high single digits in some assumptions, because monthly rebalancing can realize gains more often than a buy-and-hold index fund.

Retirement accounts avoid that current taxable-event problem, which is why they are the cleaner fit. Starting Index is not tax advice; subscribers should review taxable implementation with a qualified tax professional.

The audit trail is designed to make the record harder to revise quietly. Published dates, source metadata, hashes, and model snapshots help establish what was known and shown at the time, rather than relying on a polished story after the fact.

No. The public site shows performance, evidence, methodology, and integrity context. Current allocation details, target weights, and subscriber materials are available after access is granted.

Starting Index is an informational research and model publication. It does not provide services as a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, custodian, or trade execution provider. It is not personalized financial advice, and it does not know a reader's full financial situation, tax profile, risk tolerance, or time horizon.