My Equal Weight Portfolio Tracker by Anthony

My Equal Weight Portfolio Tracker by Anthony - October 2026 Scholarship Essay

The project that really got me curious was something I built on my own, an equal weight portfolio tracker in Excel. I am a finance major and I have always been into dividend and income investing, so I had this question I could not shake, which was basically can I build a simple rules based screen that actually finds solid income investments and holds up over time. I did not want to just read about portfolio construction in a textbook, I wanted to build the thing myself and see what happened.

So I made a tracker in Excel with a four metric screen I came up with. I was looking for beta at or under 0.75, standard deviation at or under 13, yield between 5 and 8 percent, and total return of at least 7 percent. The idea was to find investments that pay good income without bouncing around like crazy. Building it forced me to actually understand what those numbers mean instead of just memorizing definitions for a test. Like I knew what beta was on paper, but when I had to write the formulas and watch how changing the cutoff changed which investments passed the screen, it clicked in a completely different way.

What really deepened my understanding was the equal weighting part. Most funds and indexes are cap weighted, so the biggest companies dominate everything. I wanted to see what happened when every holding got the same weight, and tracking it over time showed me how much of a difference weighting actually makes. It changed how I think about diversification, because I realized diversification is not just owning a lot of things, it is about how much each thing actually matters in the portfolio.

That project sparked my curiosity way beyond the spreadsheet itself. It got me into earnings modeling and researching individual companies, and it is a big part of why I want to do financial planning as a career. I learned more from building that tracker than from any single class, because I had a real question I cared about and I had to figure out the answer myself.