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The Risk X-Ray
What it finds when I run it on my own live book
Before you paste anything in, here's the tool running honestly against AEA's own current Holdings weights — the same numbers published on the Holdings page, not a cleaned-up demo.
The three ways a portfolio quietly takes on more risk than intended
None of these require a mistake. Each one is the ordinary result of adding positions one at a time without re-checking the whole book against itself — which is most people's actual process, including mine before I built this.
Leverage compounds daily, not over your holding period
A "2× long" fund resets its multiple every trading day. Held for more than a day in a volatile name, the return you actually get can diverge sharply from 2× the underlying's return — sometimes by a lot, as the Leverage Decay Study measures directly.
The same bet, counted twice, looks like two bets
Holding a leveraged fund and its own underlying feels diversified — two line items, two tickers. It isn't. Both move on the same company's stock price, so your real single-name exposure is larger than either position looks alone.
Concentration creeps in one add at a time
No single purchase feels like "too much." But a position that started at 4% can drift to 11% purely on outperformance, quietly breaking a concentration rule nobody consciously overrode.
Your portfolio
A worked example, step by step
Rather than ask you to trust the flag, here's the exact arithmetic behind AEA's own NBIL / NBIS double-exposure flag above, worked out one line at a time. This is precisely what the tool computes internally when it finds an overlapping pair.
| Step | What it represents | Value |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | NBIL position weight (2× leveraged fund on NBIS) | 2.87% |
| 2 | NBIL weight × leverage multiple (2.87% × 2) | 5.74% |
| 3 | Direct NBIS position weight, held separately | 1.25% |
| 4 | Effective exposure to NBIS's stock price (step 2 + step 3) | 6.99% |
On paper, NBIL and NBIS look like two separate 1–3% positions — unremarkable. Aggregated the way AEA's own IPS requires, they're actually one 6.99% bet on a single company's stock price. Not over the 10% single-position cap in this case, but the point stands even when it is: the two-line-item view and the real-exposure view can tell very different stories, and only one of them is the truth you're actually underwriting.
Where this comes from
Three of these checks — single-position concentration, the leveraged-sleeve cap, and aggregating a leveraged fund with its underlying — are copied directly from AEA's own Investment Policy Statement, not invented for this tool. The leverage-decay warning is backed by measured numbers in the Leverage Decay Study, including the fund (NBIL) that made me build this in the first place.
Methodology
Leverage flag. Matched against a curated database of well-known daily-reset leveraged/inverse ETFs (research/risk-xray.js). This list is illustrative, not exhaustive — an unlisted fund will not be caught, and the tool says so rather than implying full coverage.
Concentration flag. Any position above the threshold you set (default 10%, matching AEA's own single-position cap at cost).
Hidden double-exposure. When both a leveraged fund and its own underlying appear in the same portfolio, effective single-name exposure is computed as (leveraged position weight × |leverage multiple|) + underlying position weight — the same aggregation rule stated explicitly in AEA's IPS, section 3.
Bucket mix. Only "Leveraged" and "Index Hedge" are classified, both from ticker symbol alone. Core / Emerging Growth / Speculative require a qualitative judgment about business quality and profitability stage that this tool does not attempt from a ticker in isolation — that portion is reported as unclassified rather than guessed.
What this tool intentionally does not attempt. No cost basis, tax lots, or unrealized gain/loss (it can't know what you paid). No correlation or covariance across positions, so it won't tell you that two unrelated-looking tickers actually move together. No sector or factor concentration beyond the leveraged/index-hedge split above. No options, futures, or margin exposure. Each of these is a real, different kind of risk that a ticker-and-weight list alone cannot answer honestly — the tool reports what it can verify and stops there rather than estimating the rest.
Privacy. All parsing and computation happens in your browser via JavaScript. No portfolio data is transmitted, stored, or logged by this tool or this site.
Limitations. This is a mechanical, ticker-level check, not portfolio advice. It cannot see your cost basis, tax situation, or investment goals, and it is not a substitute for judgment. Not investment advice.