The Heat Map chart displays compound annual growth rates not over a single timeframe, but over all timeframes. It’s a great way to visually evaluate how a portfolio performs throughout a variety of economic conditions. Use this to compare how a hot or cold streak stacks up against history, or to see beyond recent returns and rosy averages that may hide a turbulent past.
Chart
Overview
The Heat Map shows the inflation-adjusted CAGR for every investing timeframe based on when you invested and how long you stayed in the market. Look for the start year in the left column and count the appropriate number of squares to the right for the years held. Hover over any cell, and you can see the value of the real CAGR for that start date and investing duration.
The Heat Map is probably best utilized to understand the good and bad times for a portfolio at a glance. Look for the red spots, and that’s a nice reference point for the rough patches often hidden by simple annual returns.
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About this chart, and how to link to it
About the Heat Map
The Heat Map answers "what was the annualized return for every start year and holding period?" It grids the real (inflation-adjusted) compound annual growth rate for every combination of start year and years held, one cell each, blue for gains and red for losses, with darker shades further from zero. It is the full return history of one portfolio in one country, uncompressed, from 1970–2025.
This chart is drawn in the browser, so the figures it plots are not in this page’s HTML. Citable numbers for the standard portfolios are server-rendered on the portfolio pages, each with a table covering all 12 home countries, and the nearest chart-specific tables are on the Long Term Returns page.
Standard portfolios: 7Twelve Portfolio (7tw), All Seasons Portfolio (all), Classic 60-40 Portfolio (cla), Coffeehouse Portfolio (cof), Core Four Portfolio (c4), Global Market Portfolio (gm), Golden Butterfly (gb), Golden Ratio Portfolio (gra), Ideal Index Portfolio (iip), Ivy Portfolio (ivy), Larry Portfolio (lar), No-Brainer Portfolio (nob), Permanent Portfolio (pp), Pinwheel Portfolio (pin), Richer Retirement (rr), Sandwich Portfolio (san), Swensen Portfolio (swe), Three-Fund Portfolio (3f), Total Stock Market (tsm), Ultimate Buy & Hold (ult), Weird Portfolio (wrd).
Home countries: Australia (aus), Canada (can), France (fra), Germany (deu), Italy (ita), Japan (jpn), Netherlands (nld), Spain (esp), Sweden (swe), Switzerland (che), United Kingdom (gbr), United States (usa).
To see a specific portfolio and home country version of this chart, link readers to this page with ?pk=PORTFOLIO&home=COUNTRY using the codes listed above (e.g. ?pk=gb&home=aus), or omit ?pk= to study a custom portfolio. The link sets the portfolio and the home country, which is everything the grid depends on — there is nothing else to configure. More in the Guide for AI Assistants.