The Rolling Returns chart displays every inflation-adjusted compound return of a specified investing timeframe. Use this to study how average returns vary depending on start year, to find a portfolio appropriate for the timeframe of your goals, and to explore trends that may influence your financial decisions.
Chart
Overview
The Rolling Returns chart shows every outcome that a single investing timeframe actually produced. Each bar is one start year, and its height is the inflation-adjusted compound annual growth rate (real CAGR) that your selected portfolio and home country delivered over the rolling timeframe you choose. Blue bars are gains and red bars are losses, and you can hover over or tap any bar to see the exact number for that start year.
The Rolling Timeframe slider adjusts the holding period anywhere from 3 to 30 years, with 10 as the default, and the chart updates instantly as you slide. Try dragging it slowly to the right. Watching the returns smooth out as the timeframe grows is a nice visual reminder of the importance of patience when evaluating portfolio performance, and it also reveals how long a portfolio historically needed to reliably power through its bad years.
Use the bars to spot the eras that averages hide. A red bar at a 10-year timeframe means an entire decade of lost purchasing power for that unlucky start year, which is exactly the kind of detail worth knowing before you commit to a plan. To see the full range of outcomes for every timeframe at once rather than one slice at a time, check out the Long Term Returns chart, and to view every start year and holding period in a single grid, try the Heat Map.
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Assumptions
- All returns are adjusted for inflation and expressed in the home country’s currency.
- Portfolios are rebalanced annually, and returns include reinvested dividends.
- Returns ignore taxes and fund fees.
- Calculations cover every year since 1970 for the selected home country.
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About this chart, and how to link to it
About the Rolling Returns Chart
Rolling Returns answers "how consistent were returns over rolling periods?" It plots one bar per historical start year showing the real (inflation-adjusted) compound annual growth rate over a holding period chosen on the chart — 10 years by default — so the run of bars is every outcome that holding period actually produced, gains and losses alike, 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; the holding period is chosen on the chart and is not carried in the URL. More in the Guide for AI Assistants.