On a hot July Thursday 10 years ago, I finally summoned the willpower to do something crazy. After spending more time than I’d like to admit tinkering with my personal spreadsheets, I realized I was sitting on something pretty interesting. So I threw together a quick WordPress page, wrestled the natural butterflies into submission, and finally pulled the trigger — I hit the Publish button for the first time.
And just like that, Portfolio Charts was born.
It’s actually pretty wild to think that it has been a full decade since that first Hello World message. The journey from the meager start with a handful of portfolios and a couple of charts to the breadth and depth of tools and data we see today is impossible to succinctly explain. It’s truly a labor of love, and it’s rewarding to see the small seed you planted and nurtured grow into a mature tree.
To celebrate the occasion, I thought it would be fun for long-time readers and educational for newcomers to enjoy a quick trip down memory lane. So let’s talk about my favorite insights over the years and the evolution of my thinking over time.
The Best Articles of Each Year
2015 — How Averages Lie
My very first narrative article was short and sweet, but shared an important perspective on the dynamic reality behind static data that framed years of insights to come.
2016 — Thinking Beyond Stocks Can Fortify Your Accumulation Plan
Maxing out stocks for the high average return may sound appealing, but portfolios including bonds and other assets are more dependable, efficient, and sustainable for most investors.
2017 — Understanding Cash Will Make You a Better and Happier Investor
Modern investors often have a myopic understanding of cash that influences how they think about portfolio construction. But study history, and it gets a lot more interesting.
2018 — The Winning Ticket to Financial Freedom Isn’t a Game of Chance
Lotteries sell tickets to a nearly impossible fantasy of financial independence. But if that’s important to you, the good news is that there’s a more reliable path to your goal.
2019 — High Profits at Low Rates: The Benefits of Bond Convexity
The underlying math of bonds is about way more than interest payments. Understanding how it works can help you fit the right bond fund suitable for your portfolio.
2020 — A Faith Not Tested Cannot Be Trusted
Engineers naturally understand risk, uncertainty, and the benefits of prototyping and stress testing. Here’s how to apply the same mindset to portfolio construction.
2021 — Three Secret Ingredients of the Most Efficient Portfolios
This in-depth analysis of every possible portfolio option uncovers not only several useful ingredients but also the unintuitive effects of combining uncorrelated assets.
2022 — Unexpected Returns: Shannon’s Demon & the Rebalancing Bonus
Beyond the risk-mitigation benefits, diverse portfolios of uncorrelated assets also have a special mathematical mechanism for generating surprising risk-adjusted returns.
2023 — How Investing Personality Types Frame Your Money Perspective
Smart investors often have very different perspectives of the same portfolio problem. Understanding investing personality types can help you find your best approach.
2024 — What Global Withdrawal Rates Teach Us About Ideal Retirement Portfolios
So much of retirement research today is based on data from a small number of assets in a single outlier country. Open up the possibilities, and the data may surprise you.
How My Thinking Evolved in 10 Years
Reading through my old work, the first thing that jumps out is that I learned how to write! The difference in content and style from my short point in 2015 to the in-depth analysis in 2024 pretty much couldn’t be any more extreme. Luckily not all articles are like the last one and there’s room for lighter fare, as not every financial discussion needs to take the form of a dissertation. But it’s definitely interesting to see my data-driven roots grow and take hold.
I also feel like I have gone through a few phases over the years. My early writings dealt a lot with the concept of how uncertainty affects life goals. They later shifted into explaining more technical investing concepts like bond convexity and Shannon’s demon. And eventually I got into some really deep-dive data exercises looking at things like every possible accumulation and retirement portfolio to find the most efficient option in any country. So there’s definitely a progression of complexity that comes with more experience and depth of knowledge.
But honestly, one thing that most stands out to me is how communicating with so many everyday investors over the years has changed how I think beyond the numbers. Where the engineer in me used to see portfolio design as a raw system optimization exercise, I have come to learn that it has just as much to do with human emotion. And we’re all different. The 2023 article on investing personality types is one I think about often, and internalizing those insights to meet the needs of different people — all equally desiring portfolio guidance, but simply wired in unique ways — is one of my personal goals moving forward.
Yes, the last ten years has seen the development of lots of new charts, the addition of a bunch of new portfolios for study, and the growth of probably the most comprehensive collection of free portfolio data across multiple assets and countries that you’ll find anywhere else on the internet. But beyond the data, a decade of experience sharing all of this has taught me something I never expected in those early formative days. Investing is about more than just numbers. It’s about people.
So for everyone who has followed Portfolio Charts from day one, thank you for sticking with me and spreading the word. For the generous patrons who make the site possible, thank you so much for your support. And for all of you who care enough to make it this far and read this message, thank you, too. I started all of this because I found the topic interesting, but without your support there’s a good chance that Portfolio Charts would have withered years ago like so many blogs that sprout and quickly fade all the time. While I was tending to the data garden, you also watered me.
Now that the tree is established, I have no plans to go anywhere. And I hope you feel the same.
Let’s work together to make the next ten years even better than the first.
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