I always appreciate it when people take the time to write to offer their feedback on Portfolio Charts.  The thanks keep me going through the occasional drudgery, the corrections keep me honest, and the suggestions keep the entire exercise fresh and relevant.  The combination of all that feedback with my constant creative processing makes the site a personal passion of mine that I hope you enjoy reading and using just as much as I do writing and creating.  I’ve long felt like I owe you all a reward of some sort for your great ideas, and today I’m here to deliver.

Since I started Portfolio Charts several years ago, by far the most common request I’ve received is the ability to enter data in one place and have it carry over into each calculator.  I just want you to know that I listened.  While it took a long time to try lots of different ideas and fail plenty of times along the way, you asked the right guy with the right mix of creativity and pure stubbornness to power through the problem.  So while you may notice lots of things have changed on the site recently, let’s cut to the chase and get to the really cool part — the My Portfolio tool.

What is the My Portfolio tool?  In short, it analyzes every investing period since 1970 for any asset allocation in a handful of different countries and summarizes everything from returns uncertainty to long-term withdrawal rates all in a single easy-to-understand collection of charts.  Think of it as a normally unattainable superstar investing analyst answering your every portfolio question in an incredibly thorough report, and all you have to do is type in your portfolio percentages while taking a sip of coffee on your sofa.

Portfolio Charts was founded with a collection of separate tools to study asset allocation from a variety of angles, but the idea behind making a single tool to do it all has two huge benefits.  First, as you can imagine it makes it incredibly easy to study your own portfolio without wasting so much time reentering information on dozens of separate calculator pages.  And second, it allows me to apply the same tool to the pre-built portfolios to make all of those charts dynamic as well and greatly increase their utility while cutting down on all of the duplicate portfolio pages for each country.  The end result is a comprehensive portfolio measurement tool that remarkably manages to make the entire site both more informative and easier to use.  Talk about a good idea!

So now when you browse the top-level menus, you’ll no longer see a Calculators page at all.  Instead, there’s a supercharged Portfolios page with identical active tools not only for professional portfolios but also for your own.  Check it out — I’ll give you a minute to study this screenshot that demonstrates the My Portfolio feature in full.

 

Pretty cool, right?

The professional portfolios pages look basically identical minus the asset allocation interface, and they all share the exact same user control for individual charts.  They are also much more powerful thanks to the recent logic update and can automatically model every portfolio in every available country using the best data I have available.  So no matter whether you want to study your own asset allocation in the US or the Golden Butterfly in the UK, the new Portfolios section has you covered.

Regular users of Portfolio Charts may also notice a few changes in the charts.  A couple of former calculators had to be sacrificed to make the new My Portfolio tool efficient enough to reliably function (they’re not gone completely — look for them in the Resources), while others have been notably improved to help pick up the slack.  I’ll also point out that the interface may run a little slower than you’re used to due to the increased calculation workload, but it’s my belief that this speed penalty is more than made up for by the massive time savings over entering your data into each individual calculator.  Still, you may need to practice a little patience as you get used to things.  Everything has a tradeoff, but I’ve done my best to make design decisions that move the ball forward in the process and I hope you like the changes as much as I do.

By the way, the new Portfolios page isn’t the only change you’ll find.  I’ve also combined the former Assets and Library pages into a new more comprehensive Resources section that I think can be an intuitive landing spot for all kinds of helpful investing information.  While I anticipate adding several new things there in the near future, one particular item I’d recommend checking out is the new and improved Index Funds list where I’ve started accumulating real-world fund tickers for every asset I can find in each country on the site.  The pretty charts are about so much more than portfolio theory, and my goal is to also provide as much actionable information as I can to help you invest your own money as productively as possible.

All that said, the best-written post in the world is still no substitute for the experience of playing with the new tools and watching your own portfolio charts update in real time.  So take a few minutes to visit the Portfolios and try it for yourself.  If you find the tools helpful, please take the opportunity to spread the word!  And in the same spirit that inspired them in the first place, feel free to let me know if there’s anything you either love or would love to see improved.

Portfolio Charts is a labor of love, but thanks to you it’s also a team effort and I never feel alone.  To all who wrote asking for this feature, thank you!  This one’s for you.