Chart Talk

Tour the Investing Horizon With the Global Explorer

Advanced, Chart Talk

One of the interesting side benefits of my old engineering life was the rare opportunity to see parts of the world many people may read about but never experience first hand. From dim February days in Stockholm to colorful night markets in Taipei, the world is so much bigger than the place you’re sitting right now.

If you only judge the world by what you experience in your normal daily routine, that myopic paradigm is probably going to hold you back at some point. We are all at the center of our own experience, but the universe does not revolve around us. The world is a big place, and sometimes it requires exploring its far reaches to truly appreciate our tiny home in the larger global stage.

I have been thinking about this a lot recently, such as my last article talking about the difference in investing outcomes in various home countries. That exercise reminded me that it might be a good time to update my old Global Withdrawal Rates research with new site charting capabilities.

As often happens when I start tinkering with new tools, the creative process opened up exciting new possibilities that weren’t previously practical but now are finally within reach. And the result this time ended up being a significant enough improvement that it justified an entirely new chart!

I call it the Global Explorer, and it’s a uniquely powerful tool for learning about asset allocation from a truly global perspective.

The Global Explorer is about way more than just ranking famous portfolios. It explores a wide world of options, tens of thousands of portfolios at a time, that your own close circle of financial friends may not have ever considered. So if you have ever wondered what types of portfolios are best suited for certain goals like accumulation, retirement, and risk mitigation — not just in the US or your own home country, but everywhere — then pull up a chair and allow me to share my full travel guide to universal portfolio construction.

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Portfolio Charts Just Got a Huge Upgrade

Chart Talk, Updates

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.

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Find Your Ideal Allocation With the Portfolio Optimizer

Chart Talk, Updates

The universe is a big place. You can spend an entire lifetime staring at the skies, mapping every familiar constellation, and getting lost in the beautiful nebulas. But with enough persistence and the right tools you can still find new stars and galaxies that you never knew existed. Space is just that full of countless possibilities.

Choosing a portfolio can sometimes feel the same way. You can know all of the major celestial objects and may even have a favorite you call your own, but the millions of possible options are hard to ignore. So as you contemplate the skies at night thinking about the future you’d like to achieve as soon as possible, it’s natural to wonder what would happen if you just looked a little harder. One more asset. A slightly different percentage. If only you had the right telescope, a better solution might be out there waiting to be discovered.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years studying portfolio options. But beyond just mapping the skies, I’ve always enjoyed putting my engineering background to good use to work on the tools as well. Today I’m excited to announce a major new upgrade to an old favorite.

I call it the Optimizer. And if you’re looking for new portfolio ideas to expand your investing horizons, you’ve come to the right place.

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What Global Withdrawal Rates Teach Us About Ideal Retirement Portfolios

Insights, Chart Talk, Featured, Retirement

Between my own independent research and the discussions of other investors I enjoy reading, it seems the topic of safe withdrawal rates has been bubbling to the top lately. One particular question recently captured my attention.

What portfolio has the best safe withdrawal rate in the worst case scenario around the world?

You see, the vast majority of withdrawal rate research focuses on the United States. However, most people consider the US to be an extremely positive outlier, which raises legitimate questions about the appropriateness of determining one’s retirement plan by myopically focusing on only the best case country. Start exploring this question in earnest, and it draws into question not only our biases about what “normal” returns look like but also our assumptions about proper portfolio construction.

While it may sound like a simple question, answering it with real numbers is no small task. The reason that most retirement studies focus on a small handful of countries and portfolio options is that understanding the big retirement picture takes a lot of data. And not just raw source data, but also a mountain of creative calculations to do the topic justice.

Well, it so happens that creative calculations are a strength of mine and I have a few tricks up my sleeve. So let’s roll up those sleeves and talk about truly global withdrawal rates that look well beyond US borders.

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Track Portfolio Progress With the Rank Over Time Chart

Chart Talk

When choosing a guide to carry supplies for a winding journey ahead, it’s worth taking a moment to evaluate the right person for the job. Their relative rank over time is usually not so simple. The strongest option might be painfully slow in the flat roads, while the fastest man on earth might falter at the first sign of mountain steps.

When the road is a mystery and you have no idea what obstacles may lie ahead, the challenge multiplies. At some point you have to stop optimizing for strength or speed and start thinking about well-rounded consistency. A guide who can handle any conditions pretty well can easily beat out a team of specialists.

Even if you’re not the outdoor adventuring type, investors face this challenge all the time. Your chosen asset allocation is your guide who carries your life savings on your financial journey, and you have no idea where the future road may lead. Finding a balanced portfolio with a consistent track record can make the process a lot easier, as you can rest easy knowing you’re in good hands no matter what happens.

To help with that evaluation process, I’ve just launched a brand new chart designed to compare the relative returns of many different portfolios at any time in history. Think of it as browsing the performance of dozens of guides at once under any conditions you choose. I call it the Rank Over Time chart, and it’s a great way to find your financial partner for the unknown road ahead.

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The Best Returns Quilt Covers All Portfolios

Chart Talk

People love a good list. From the most memorable events of the year to best phones on the market, there’s never a shortage of ranked lists to get your attention and perhaps point you in the right direction. So it’s no surprise that I’ve received several requests over the years for a particular chart that is popular in financial circles for evaluating investing options — a returns quilt chart that ranks many options at once.

That’s a great suggestion!

While it has taken a little time to settle on a design angle that I like, I’ve definitely been thinking about the concept. In honor of the end-of-year list season, this seems like a great time to roll out the final result. So if you want to learn about a fun new tool to help you visualize the annual performance of every portfolio at once, this is your lucky day.

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The Portfolio Toolkit Is Ready for Any Data Challenge

Updates, Chart Talk

One of the most rewarding things about working on Portfolio Charts over the years is how it has kept me on my creative toes. While building a few spreadsheets to answer my own financial questions is certainly a great motivator, designing them in such a way that anyone around the world can also put them to productive use is quite the challenge. That process of picturing your own ideas through outside eyes is educational in its own way and often exposes opportunities for improvement. So designing for both yourself and for others is a mutually beneficial exercise that’s hard to beat for progressive innovation.

I’ve been tinkering within that cycle a lot lately. It started with a simple cleanup of my own data collection that I use to power the site, which was admittedly rather complicated with several different spreadsheets that I used to pull everything together. After creating a brand new system from scratch, I was so happy with the results that I realized others might find it similarly useful.

Fast forward several months and more revisions than I care to count, and I’m excited to announce a very cool new product offering — the Portfolio Charts Toolkit.

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The Right Savings Rate Will Conquer Any Bear Market

Beginner, Chart Talk, Goals, Theory

One of the things I like about the safe withdrawal rate is that it’s a rare financial metric that accounts for the worst case. While everyone else was comparing withdrawals to average returns, William Bengen had the foresight to study every investing period he could find and determine the maximum amount of money that a retiree could have safely withdrawn over 30 years even in the worst possible timeframe to retire. By flipping the problem from an exercise in chasing ever-shifting averages to studying worst-case scenarios, Bengen’s safe withdrawal rate really did make life after accumulation a lot safer for retirees.

Look at the title image of a pair of grain silos and imagine your comfort level with them filled with just enough grain to barely make it through an average year. Now picture them with enough grain to survive the worst famine on record. That’s a huge difference, and Bengen’s new perspective completely changed the way people think about retirement.

As helpful as that is, however, not everybody is in the phase of career and life where retirement is an impending concern. But I still find the approach enlightening, so let’s expand our thinking. Have you ever wondered what a similar metric might look like for accumulators seeking to guarantee long-term success in uncertain markets? Put another way, what percentage of your crop must you save in those silos every year in order to fill them by a certain date? And if the stored grain grows and shrinks on its own like money invested in stocks and bonds, how would that affect the results?

If that type of question feels as interesting to you as it does to me, this article is for you.

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Find the Right Funds to Build a Great Portfolio

Beginner, Chart Talk, Theory

When looking for opportunities to make new connections, there’s something to be said for looking like you know what you’re doing. One time when I was browsing the produce section of the local grocery store for a few peaches to add to the basket, a young kid sheepishly approached and asked for some friendly advice.

“Could you please explain how to find a good peach? I’m supposed to get some but have no idea what to look for.”

Now I realize people strike up random conversations at the store for all sorts of reasons, but I could tell he was out of his element. I got the impression he was under orders to bring home a certain list of items and was truly lacking the knowledge to do it correctly, and I was particularly impressed that he took the initiative to ask for help. I’m no chef by any means, but I was happy to offer my own experience of selecting them by feel and smell and letting any peach that is a little hard ripen for a few days before eating. With a few nice ones in-hand, we went our separate ways to enjoy a future sunny afternoon with a really tasty fruit.

Thinking back on that experience, I’ve always been keenly aware of how important it is to not only suggest an idea but to also offer enough information to make it actionable. So many financial voices lecture about investing concepts only to stop at the theoretical stage without bridging the gap to how normal people can act on those ideas. Sometimes it’s out of self-interest when their end goal is to drive readers to hire them for their financial services. Occasionally you run across a noble but detached research type who revels in unraveling the data but never actually makes the connection to anything that applies in the real world. And of course some people just like to talk without always fully understanding what they’re talking about. But regardless of the motivation, truly helping people is about so much more than simply convincing them that they should buy peaches without explaining how to actually do it. You have to take that next step.

In that same practical spirit, I’m really excited to share a new tool that I’ve been working on for a long time. If you’ve ever explored Portfolio Charts and found an asset allocation that looks perfect for you but struggled to figure out how to act on that knowledge, I now have just the thing to help. I call it the Fund Finder.

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