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Rebalancing your portfolio requires buying and selling shares. In most countries that will attract capital gains taxes, often affected by when you bought those shares.

If you care about tax efficiency -- which can severely deplete your on-paper returns -- then it's not really ~5 lines of code at all.

If you're looking for dumb-and-good-enough, delegating the fiddly rebalancing problem to someone with economies of scale isn't really so bad.

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Rebalancing does not necessarily require selling shares - a different strategy is to rebalance at the same time that you want to add money to your portfolio by buying the shares necessarily for rebalancing. This would prevent the taxable event of selling.

Rebalancing is the service offered by Wealthfront and Betterment though. The same downsides of rebalancing should apply to them as well, no?

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