Pure Benchmarks · Peer Benchmark
What Is a Peer Benchmark in Investing?
A peer benchmark measures your portfolio against other real investors carrying the same kind of risk rather than against a market index or a theoretical model. Institutional investors have used peer benchmarking for decades. Retail investors have never had one, because building it requires verified performance data from real connected accounts held across many different custodians — a cross-custodial dataset no brokerage, no wealth management firm, and no reporting tool has ever assembled for the client side. Pure Benchmarks built it independently: every connected portfolio is recategorized daily from actual end-of-day holdings into one of nine standardized risk categories, from 100 percent equity to 90 percent fixed income, then ranked against thousands of other verified portfolios inside that category.
How a peer benchmark differs from an index benchmark
An index benchmark asks how a fixed basket of securities performed. A peer benchmark asks how real people in your situation performed. The first measures a market. The second measures decisions, because everyone in the comparison faced the same market with the same kind of risk.
Why retail investors have never had one
A peer benchmark needs verified holdings from real accounts across custodians, recategorized often enough to stay accurate. Brokerages hold only their own customers. Wealth management firms hold the comparison internally and have never published it. No independent party had assembled the dataset for the client side until Pure Benchmarks did.
What the Pure Nine risk categories are
The Pure Nine are nine standardized allocation categories spanning 100 percent equity to 90 percent fixed income. Every connected portfolio is placed into one of them daily from actual end-of-day holdings, which is what makes the ranking comparable across custodians, account types, and firms.
What a cross-custodial benchmark makes possible
Once the peer set exists, three questions become answerable for the first time: where you rank among real investors in your category, whether each major portfolio change helped or hurt relative to those investors, and how portfolios at any one firm compare to portfolios everywhere else.
Your current platform won't show you how your portfolio ranks against real investors in the same risk category. Create your secure Pure Benchmarks account and see exactly where you stand.
See Your Free Benchmark ReportFrequently asked questions
What is a peer benchmark in investing?
A peer benchmark measures your portfolio against other real investors carrying the same kind of risk over the same period, rather than against a market index. Pure Benchmarks builds it from verified connected portfolios across nine standardized risk categories.
Why has there never been a benchmark for retail investors?
It requires verified cross-custodial holdings data from real accounts, recategorized continuously. Brokerages see only their own customers and wealth management firms have never published the comparison they already hold internally, so no independent client-side benchmark existed until Pure Benchmarks built one.
What is the Pure Nine?
The Pure Nine are the nine standardized allocation categories Pure Benchmarks sorts every connected portfolio into, spanning 100 percent equity to 90 percent fixed income. Ranking happens inside a category so no portfolio is measured against a risk level it never took.
What is a cross-custodial portfolio benchmark?
A benchmark built from verified portfolios held at many different custodians rather than at a single brokerage. Cross-custodial data is what makes the peer set represent real investors instead of one platform's customer base.
What is a Community Nest?
A Community Nest is the peer group your portfolio is ranked inside — real verified investors in the same standardized risk category, including other clients at the same firm, compared using anonymized performance data.
How does Pure Benchmarks categorize my portfolio?
Holdings are read daily through a read-only secure connection, priced at end of day, and the resulting allocation places the portfolio into one of the nine standardized risk categories. Because it is recalculated daily, the category follows the portfolio as it changes.
Keep exploring
- How Do You Know If Your Portfolio Is Doing Well?
- Compare Your Portfolio to Real Investors, Not an Index
- Is the S&P 500 the Right Benchmark for Your Portfolio?
- Is Your Financial Advisor Doing a Good Job?
- How Do You Know If Your 401k Is Doing Well?
- What Is Hetty?
- Hetty: The AI Portfolio Assistant That Knows Your Real Peers
See how portfolios at a specific firm rank against real investors everywhere else:
New here? Read the portfolio benchmarking FAQ or the Pure Benchmarks blog.
This page is an information baseline for comparison only. It is not investment advice and not a recommendation to buy, sell, replace, or transfer any specific asset, account, or firm. Past performance does not guarantee future results. All figures shown are illustrative.