The problem

I use TradingView for technical analysis and stock picking. A portfolio tracker for the wealth overview. JustETF to pick my ETFs. And my broker's website to place orders. Four tools, four interfaces, four different logics.

On desktop, it's fine. On mobile, it's a mess. I can't operate TradingView on my phone screen; and I suspect I'm not the only one.

What I was missing was a simple macro view. Not another analysis tool. Just a weather forecast: sunny or stormy on the markets? US, Europe, emerging markets, commodities, currencies; all at a glance.

I looked for it. Didn't find it. So I built it.

Too much information kills information

Retail investors have never had access to so much information. Daily newsletters, YouTube finance channels, Twitter threads, push alerts, podcasts, Discord servers. Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a conviction. Everyone has a prediction.

Paradoxically, the more information we have, the less clarity we get. We jump from one source to another, compare contradictory analyses, and end up not knowing what to think. Financial information overload is a real problem.

What I needed was the opposite: no opinion, no prediction, no "I think the market will...". Just raw visual data, without commentary. A form of informational minimalism. Less noise, more signal.

Why bubbles

Tables and candlestick charts are everywhere. Nothing against them; Iuse them daily. But that's not what I needed for the big picture.

I wanted something fast to load. No photos of central bank presidents. No heavy images. Something that works in a waiting room with crappy wifi.

That meant: geometry only. And bubbles came up pretty quickly.

In finance, "bubble" is an anxiety-inducing word; the AI bubble, the real estate bubble, the thing that's going to pop. I found it interesting to flip the concept. A bubble can also be soft, organic, reassuring. ETFBubbles' bubbles float peacefully. Green means up, red means down. One glance and you understand where the money is flowing.

I often leave ETFBubbles in a small window in the corner of my screen. It's like a tamagotchi you don't need to feed.

The news trap

Financial media has a structural problem: they need to produce content every day. Even when nothing interesting is happening.

The result: a 2% drop becomes a "crash". A 3% rise becomes a "historic rally". Every movement is dramatized, every fluctuation becomes an event. Investors who follow financial news daily end up living in a permanent state of alert.

Timeframe visualization puts things in perspective. A bubble can be bright red for the day and dark green for the year. What looks like a catastrophe over 24 hours is often just statistical noise over 12 months.

I stopped checking my portfolio's daily variations. What matters is the trend. ETFBubbles helps maintain that discipline: one look at the 1-year or 3-year view, and the drama of the day is immediately put into perspective.

Seven views, seven angles

ETFBubbles offers seven different views. The idea is to get an exhaustive vision of the market from multiple angles.

The Macro view sets the general tone: major indices, gold, oil, Bitcoin, bonds. The Regions view compares the major economic zones. The Countries view goes one level deeper to see who's performing where. World Sectors and US help you understand where money is flowing; not market cap, but actual performance over the selected period.

That's the distinction I care about. I don't want to know that tech represents 30% of the market. I want to know if tech is going up or down right now, and how it compares to energy or healthcare.

The Europe view does the same for European markets. And the Themes view explores trends beyond AI; uranium, cybersecurity, water, clean energy, gaming, and more.

Who it's for

ETFBubbles is for the beginner investor who's heard about the S&P 500 and the MSCI World but doesn't want to blindly buy what everyone else is buying. They want to understand the market before taking a position.

It's also for the passive investor who already has a portfolio and just wants to check the market weather from time to time. They have a job, a family, stuff to do on weekends. They don't want to open their broker's complex interface on Sunday morning. A quick look at ETFBubbles, they see their Uranium ETF is doing fine, they put on their sneakers and go for a run.

It's probably not for the seasoned investor with 47 TradingView alerts who's mastered charts on their phone. They don't need this.

Satisficing over maximizing

In behavioral psychology, there are two profiles: the "maximizer" and the "satisficer". The maximizer seeks the best possible option. They compare everything, analyze everything, optimize everything. The satisficer looks for an option that's good enough and moves on.

The maximizer in investing is the one who spends hours finding the perfect ETF, compares fees down to the hundredth of a percent, waits for the ideal entry point. They often end up doing nothing, paralyzed by analysis.

The satisficer understands that the market generally goes up over the long term, picks a decent ETF, invests regularly, and lives their life.

ETFBubbles is built for the satisficer. The tool doesn't claim to give all the answers. It gives just enough information to make a reasonable decision and move on. That's sufficient. And "sufficient", in investing, is often better than "perfect".

Custom: building your own strategies

The Custom view lets you create your own dashboard. But I don't use it to track my portfolio; Ihave a portfolio tracker for that.

I use it to build strategies and test them. Right now, I'm looking at Equal Weight ETFs: funds that weight all holdings equally instead of overweighting the giants. It's a way to bet on the market average rather than on the locomotives.

I built a view with only Equal Weight ETFs to see how they behave over different periods. It's become my playground for testing ideas.

Surprises

ETFBubbles has already surprised me a few times.

Silver, for example. Looking at the Macro view over 3 years, I realized the magnitude of its performance: +300%. Everyone talks about gold, but silver has had a remarkable run these past few years. Without this visualization, I probably wouldn't have grasped the full extent of the move.

Another discovery: Peru. Comparing emerging market countries, Peru often comes out well. Better than Poland, for instance, which I would have intuitively ranked higher. This kind of discovery is exactly what I was looking for: seeing things I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

Accessible doesn't mean dumbed down

There's a trend in fintech to gamify everything, simplify everything, make everything "fun". Confetti when you place an order. Badges when you reach a goal. Push notifications celebrating a 0.5% gain.

I find it condescending. ETFs are sophisticated financial products. The people who use them aren't children who need to be distracted with animations.

ETFBubbles makes information accessible without distorting it. The bubbles are intuitive, but they represent real data. Size corresponds to volume, color to performance. It's a visualization, not a simplification.

Making something accessible isn't dumbing it down. It's finding the right representation so that information is immediately understandable without losing its substance.

What it won't be

We've all been burned by tech products that were nice at first and became unusable. Who still sees their friends' posts on Facebook? (Yes, I said Facebook. I know.) Who can stand YouTube without an ad blocker?

ETFBubbles won't be that kind of product. No shady broker affiliations. No sketchy partnerships.

There might be ads someday; servers don't pay for themselves. But when that happens, it won't degrade the experience. User experience is the site's reason for being. Everything else is secondary.