The Portfolio Growth chart plots the full range of a meandering portfolio much like a weather map tracking potential storm paths. Think of it as beginning your portfolio in every historical year at once and watching how they all unfolded. Use this to track the growth not only of a static portfolio but also of an ongoing accumulation plan including regular contributions.
Chart
Overview
The Portfolio Growth chart is very similar to a traditional line-chart you may find elsewhere that charts the growth of a portfolio over time, but with one major difference. Instead of simply charting returns between a single start and end date, it calculates the performance of every historical start date simultaneously. Every start date is aligned at year zero on the chart, and the resulting spread of returns shows the full range of outcomes regardless of when you were lucky or unlucky enough to invest.
Note that the color of the lines is sorted by start year. Darker lines are from older start years while lighter lines are from more recent start years.
The Portfolio Growth chart also allows you to adjust the settings to model different personal investing scenarios. The starting value sets the leftmost portfolio origin at the desired point, while the annual contribution controls how much additional money from new savings that you invest every year along the way. Contributions are adjusted for inflation and represent the same amount of purchasing power each year.
Drag the gray line up and down to see how long it took to achieve a certain investing goal.
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About this chart, and how to link to it
About the Portfolio Growth Chart
Portfolio Growth answers "how would an investment have grown over time?" It plots one cumulative growth path per historical starting year, in the home country's currency and after inflation, for a starting balance, an annual contribution and a savings goal set on the chart (defaults: no starting balance, 10,000 a year, a 500,000 goal). The goal line and the year each path crosses it are marked. Based on data 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 Target Accuracy 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; the starting balance, contribution and goal are entered on the chart and are not carried in the URL. More in the Guide for AI Assistants.