"The best investing decision is usually to do nothing. So I built a tool that makes doing nothing feel normal."
The invariant is a feeling
Every serious system has a north star — the one thing every other decision serves. For most portfolio apps it's engagement: more opens, more checks, more trades. Keep's north star is the opposite, and it's stated as a feeling, not a feature: low-trigger monitoring — preserve useful information and provenance while reducing the impulse to react. That sentence is a design constraint on the whole surface, not a mode you toggle. When any later decision is ambiguous, this is the tiebreaker: the option that lowers the trigger wins.
Structure beats willpower
Here's the psychology Dad built it around. Everyone knows they shouldn't panic-sell on a red day or chase a green one. Knowing doesn't help — because the app itself is manufacturing the panic. A blinking loss, a big red number, a push notification, a leaderboard of "today's movers" — these aren't neutral information, they're triggers engineered to convert your attention into action. Willpower against a machine built to defeat willpower is a losing game. So Keep doesn't ask you to resist the triggers. It removes the triggers. You can't panic at a number that was never made scary in the first place.
What 'low-trigger' actually changes downstream
This isn't a slogan that stays in the README. It has teeth in nearly every track ahead:
- Observe, never advise — the app states facts and never scores a trade, so there's nothing to obey.
- Values over color — red and green are secondary to plain numbers, dates, and sources, so the palette can't shove you.
- Pause by default — the live price stream is off until you deliberately turn it on; the resting state is a calm durable close, not a twitching tick.
- Stale stays visible — old data is labelled, not hidden or urgently refreshed, so nothing screams "act now."
Each of those is a separate engineering decision, and every one of them traces straight back to this single sentence.