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.

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.

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.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Do you hear that?

No, it’s not the old bathroom faucet driving you crazy by breaking the nighttime silence. If only it was that simple! One inexpensive gasket would fix that right up, but this is something much more insidious.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

It’s the sound of your portfolio leaking thousands of dollars a year.

Like many areas of study with reams of background knowledge, one of the challenges of learning about engineering is the sheer number of books required. And we’re not just talking about small paperbacks telling straightforward linear stories, but massive volumes of technical data where the chapters are often referenced out of order based on the research subject of the day. Even when you eventually identify what you’re looking for, it’s really easy to forget where you found it or have a tough time explaining to others how to compile the same information. So when you find a particularly useful page in the deep sea of options, nothing beats a good bookmark.

Bookmarks are super handy in portfolio research as well. Spend enough time searching for the perfect combination of assets to meet your needs, and you’re bound to eventually find one that piques your interest. Rather than diligently documenting and re-entering multi-asset portfolios by hand, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to save and share ideas as easily as referencing a bookmarked page?

That’s a question I’ve been thinking about for years, and I’m excited to announce that I finally have a working solution. It’s not a traditional bookmark in the physical or website sense, but in a way it’s even more flexible. Portfolio Charts now features portfolio shortcodes!