When I first started college as a young aspiring engineer ages ago, there was one particular thermodynamics professor who had an outsized impact on how I think about engineering design. In addition to being the kind of intimidatingly brilliant engineer they assign to weed-out classes who wrote the book he was teaching from, he also forced everyone to read his hand-bound manual on Microsoft Excel for engineers. While I can’t say I remember a whole lot about the Carnot cycle these days, that early Excel training stuck with me.

From building fancy iterative calculations to constructing well-labeled charts, he taught me not only how to work Excel but how to stretch it to do things most people don’t even know it’s capable of. As a young mechanical engineer, it basically became my programming language of choice. And anyone who has ever tinkered with the tools here at Portfolio Charts has experienced the fruits of that early education. Even if it wasn’t obvious, they were all built in Excel.

Of course, using a tool primarily designed for desktop spreadsheets as the foundation for web development has major limits. The interface can feel a little slow and clunky, there are technical limits to how many calculations a single spreadsheet can handle, and regardless of how much you try to finesse the UI it’s impossible to shake that classic spreadsheet feeling. There’s arguably a charm to it, but at some point it also becomes a barrier to new features. So for years I have had a list of things I’d love to do if only I could find the right tools to make them happen.

Well, apparently those tools have arrived. With the invention of highly-capable AI coding assistants, the barrier for a guy like me with lots of technical knowledge and a mind for design but minimum coding skills is all but gone. Getting the first working prototype back from Claude felt a lot like watching my first complex Excel model converge on a solution. It’s a game changer.

So today I am happy to announce the biggest single update to Portfolio Charts since I started it more than a decade ago. Every chart has been rebuilt from scratch. And they are way faster, much more powerful, and just plain fun to use.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the cool new features to look out for.

Working Sample

One of the nice features from my perspective is how easily it allows me to embed working charts into web pages. While you probably don’t care about that, it lets me to do stuff like share fully functional charts in articles! For example, this is the full portfolio dashboard for the Golden Butterfly portfolio. Play around with it for a minute, and you’ll quickly start to appreciate the huge leap forward in functionality.

Fast Performance

Even before you study the charts, the first thing you should notice is just how fast they load and respond to new inputs. Chart loading times got way out of hand over the years as more features were added, but the new modern system should load within a second or two for most people. No more staring at a page wondering why it is taking so long.

And depending on where you’re reading this, you may have already discovered another major performance boost. While the old Excel-based charts were hit and miss on mobile devices, the new ones are fully responsive and should have no issues on smartphones and tablets.

Basically, the entire site should just work with less friction between you and the data.

Smooth New Interface

In addition to the charts themselves, the primary asset allocation interface also received a major facelift. Gone are the old black boxes for data entry, and in is a much snappier and immersive interface that even helps you learn how it works along the way. Try hovering over the allocation boxes or individual slices of the portfolio donut in the top-left to get real-time details on every input.

Note that while the interface looks way more streamlined than before, all of the individual country options are still there. Just choose a country from the dropdown to add stocks, bonds, and bills for as many countries as you like. Also keep that Custom Assets section in mind, and we will get to that in a moment.

Interactive Elements

With speed solved, that also opens up new opportunities for live chart interactions. If you drag a slider or hover over the chart area you’ll notice that many of the visual elements update in real time. From asset descriptions in the allocation interface to numbers for individual chart datapoints, there’s way more information at your fingertips than before.

As you explore the new charts, some may appear to be missing many of the previous settings options. They are most likely still there and simply moved from static data entry fields to draggable chart lines. One good example is the Retirement Spending chart. Instead of setting the spending limits and account triggers at the top, just drag the horizontal lines directly.

The new interactivity is a huge step forward, and will make the charts much more engaging overall. For example, I chose the Retirement Spending chart for this example because dragging the change limit sliders and experiencing the effect they have on the lines helped me understand the influence of those levers way better than I ever did before. Sometimes the process of tinkering is just as important than the output, and the new charts are designed for experimentation.

Save & Share Charts

One of the features I have always envied with similar online backtesting tools is the ability to share a link to a specific portfolio. I created the old Bookmark feature in an attempt to address this, but it was always a bit clunky to use and difficult to manage on my end. That friction is one of the reasons I eventually made it a members-only feature, as members might be willing to deal with it but newcomers that the links are often intended for were immediately confused and irritated.

Well, Portfolio Charts now supports chart links! Look at the bottom of a chart, and there is a new Save & Share section. One of the options is Link (you won’t find it in the examples in this article, but it’s on each dedicated chart page), and clicking it does two things. First, it saves your current chart settings to the server. And second, it copies a link to your clipboard. Paste it into the URL bar of your browser, and voilà! A custom chart. For example, here’s a link to a Drawdowns chart for an French 60/40 portfolio. Links are public and free for everyone, so share away!

Another popular request I have received many times over the years is the ability to save chart images. Manual screenshots sometimes work, but they take effort. And when a chart is long enough to not even fit on one screen then screenshots are no help.

All charts now have a Save & Share option called Image. You can tweak the chart with any settings you want, and clicking the image button will save a perfectly formatted png file to your computer. Maybe you’re collecting images for your own reference, or to share in a message board or blog post. Either way, the image feature is a great new tool for generating your own custom charts.

Updated Toolkit

Speaking of custom charts, one more feature that got a huge update is the Toolkit. The Toolkit is a special tool designed for members to supercharge portfolio research, and now it’s an especially powerful one-stop-shop that members will probably want to immediately bookmark.

The Toolkit features three things not found anywhere else on the site:

Create all charts with a single interface

Remember the cool chart-switching feature in the first example? The Toolkit works the same way but adds the standard allocation interface. It also rolls the three old Toolkit components (Dashboard, Portfolio Matrix, and Optimizer) into one unified tool. So you can model any portfolio you like and effortlessly switch between charts without ever leaving the page.

Store custom data in your own personal keychain

Instead of using an external Google Sheet to manage custom asset data like before, the Tooklit builds the keychain directly into the browser. Upload your asset data to create an asset key that is stored in the cloud. The assets you create will appear in a new dropdown in the Custom Assets section of the allocation interface allowing you to mix and match your data with every other asset on the site.

In addition to asset keys, the keychain can also store portfolio keys. Charts created in the Toolkit will have a new option in the Save & Share section called Save. Saving a portfolio adds the portfolio key to your keychain, allowing you to quickly load any saved portfolio for quick reference. Note that portfolio keys can also include custom data from your asset keys!

Special Toolkit-only charts

Finally, the Toolkit includes a few particularly powerful charts reserved for members only — the Portfolio Matrix and Optimizer. The Portfolio Matrix compares your portfolio to every other standard portfolio on the site across many different metrics simultaneously. And the Optimizer looks at every possible combination of assets in a portfolio to find the best possible variation on the same theme.

Speaking of the Optimizer, it definitely received the biggest performance boost in the new update. While it was previously limited to 8 assets in 20% intervals to keep the calculations to something Excel could reasonably handle, let’s just say modern code can run circles around it. Now it not only handles 10 assets in 10% intervals (nearly 100k portfolios at a time), but it also can do calculation-intensive things like find the most efficient portfolio by the long term withdrawal rate.

So no matter whether you’re an old member who hasn’t tried the Toolkit in a while or a new one wondering what it’s all about, today is a great day to try out a membership to see the exciting new tools!

Only the Beginning

Thinking back to my old days of learning Excel for the first time, it was equal parts exciting, empowering, and hair-pulling frustrating. I’m sure the same applies here.

I’m super happy with how the new tech helps Portfolio Charts live up to the name by reinforcing what makes it unique — great charts. Converting everything is just the first step! The creative doors it unlocks will lead to new ideas I haven’t even thought of yet, and it will be fun to see how the site evolves moving forward.

I also have no doubt that there will be some stumbling blocks along the way. Even as much as I have planned and tested, I’ll be shocked if there aren’t some technical issues in the near term while we all adjust to the new system. So if you experience an error message, spot a bug, or just are generally confused about something, please don’t hesitate to contact me. With your help, we can work together to quickly smooth out the kinks.

And finally, there’s the matter of that old feature request list that has been collecting virtual dust in a file somewhere. Once we’re officially running with no urgent issues to fix, it could be just the time to revisit some of those great suggestions that maybe weren’t possible at the time but are now. So if you have ever wished for a Portfolio Charts feature, now is a great time to ask!

I know I’ll never give up Excel, as honestly I have used it for so long that it’s part of how I think. But life for a designer is about more than just sleeping on the same old foundation every night. We plan, build, fail, build again, and before you know it there’s a whole new building to call home.

I hope you enjoy the new digs. Even after more than a decade of continuous improvement, it’s amazing what new tools can help you accomplish. And I’m just getting started.