Disclaimer

Educational use, not financial advice

This site is an educational tool. Nothing on it is a personal recommendation to buy, sell or hold any investment, and nothing on it takes account of your circumstances, goals, tax position or tolerance for risk. We are not licensed to advise you and we are not trying to.

Before making any investment decision, speak to someone licensed to advise you in your own country.

Every number here is an estimate

Results are worked out from the best data available to us, and will differ from what you would actually have seen. Among the reasons:

• Prices are monthly closing values from a single free data source, refreshed on a rotation, so the most recent month can be several days behind and may still move.
• Where a fund is not carried on its home exchange, an equivalent listing elsewhere in the same currency is used. It is the same instrument, quoted slightly differently.
• Some holdings currently show price return only, without dividends reinvested. The portfolio builder says so when it applies.
• Everything is shown before tax, inflation, fees, spreads and currency conversion, any of which can change the outcome substantially.
• A portfolio is modelled as buy-and-hold with no rebalancing, and all holdings must share one currency, because no exchange-rate conversion is applied.

Projections are assumptions, not forecasts

In Basic mode the rate of return is a number you choose. The presets are rounded long-run historical averages offered as a starting point; they are not predictions, and no rate of return is guaranteed. Past performance does not predict future results.

Real returns do not arrive in equal yearly instalments. A smooth curve is a useful way to see how compounding behaves over time; it is not what a real account balance looks like along the way.

Where the data comes from

Share and fund prices come from Alpha Vantage as monthly adjusted closes. Bank rates come from the ECB Data Portal (euro-area household deposits). Both ship as static files with the site and are refreshed on a schedule, so nothing you do here is sent to a data provider.