Portfolio Charts

What it is

Portfolio Charts takes an asset allocation — stocks by size and style, treasuries by maturity, REITs, gold and commodities, each domestic or ex-domestic — and draws sixteen charts of how that mix behaved from 1970 to the end of 2025. You type the percentages into the page; there is no account and no ticker, because the site models index asset classes rather than funds.

The chart set is the product, and each answers a different question. Drawdowns maps every real loss and how many years it took to recover. Long Term Returns and Rolling Returns show the whole spread of outcomes by holding period rather than an average. Heat Map gives the real CAGR for every combination of start year and years held. Withdrawal Rates reports the rate that survived every 30-year retirement in the data; Savings Rates and Financial Independence run the accumulation half. Global Explorer ranks every combination of up to nine asset classes by its worst case across all twelve countries at once. None of it is a simulation — every number is an outcome that actually occurred.

It is one person's work, published under the pen name Tyler through Portfolio Charts, LLC in Texas. The methodology is documented page by page and the charts were rebuilt out of Excel into real code in March 2026 — but there is nobody to escalate to. Liveness is not the risk it usually is with a solo site: the last article is dated 2 September 2026 and the terms were revised on 11 September 2026.

Pricing

Every chart page is free and account-free, and the site carries no ads and no affiliate links — its terms say so explicitly. A membership, Patron of the Charts, is $5 a month as a floor rather than a fixed price, with a 7-day trial. It buys the Toolkit, $5 of monthly shop credit and a Discord role. Merchandise runs $13.99 to $39.99.

One caveat: the site's FAQ still says everything is free with no subscription required, which is true of the charts and not of the Toolkit.

Data & coverage

Annual, inflation-adjusted total returns, 1970 through 2025, refreshed once a year in early January. Twelve home countries are supported and the choice switches the currency, the inflation series, the ETF suggestions and the domestic/international framing of the standard portfolios.

The series are assembled by hand in a documented priority order — index data, then fund annual reports with the expense ratio refunded, then academic sources, then substitutes where nothing exists, mostly non-US small and value stocks before 1975. Calculations assume annual rebalancing and reinvested dividends; taxes and fund fees are excluded and remain the reader's problem.

Integrations

There is no public API, and the site says so on its own Guide for AI Assistants page. What it offers instead is URLs and HTML. ?pk= and ?home= deep-link any standard portfolio, or a single asset class, into any chart for any of the twelve countries, and a chart footer's Link button mints a short hash encoding a custom allocation — reusable on any chart page, impossible to construct. The citable numbers are server-rendered tables: every portfolio page carries all twelve countries, eight of the sixteen chart pages carry per-portfolio tables under stable anchors, and asset pages list each fund's ticker, ISIN, provider, index and expense ratio. The charts themselves are drawn in the browser and are not in the HTML at all.

Data goes in one way only — a member typing an asset's annual returns into the Toolkit, which converts the currency and backfills missing years from a similar asset. The Excel workbook and Google Sheet older pages point at are gone.

Limitations

• Annual data. Drawdowns are measured on year-end values, so they read milder than the monthly or daily figures other backtesters report — the site says so itself and suggests supplementing it for absolute worst-case numbers.
• 1970 is the start. No 1929, no 1966 peak, 56 years of scenarios rather than 150.
• Asset classes, not securities. You cannot test a fund, a stock or anything outside the site's buckets.
• No export and no API. A chart saves as an image or a link, never as data, and the terms forbid redistributing or reverse engineering it. Image reuse is allowed non-commercially with credit.
• No tracking. It knows nothing about what you hold, contribute or withdraw in reality.
• Twelve countries is not the world. No emerging market is available as a home country.

Alternatives

Portfolio Visualizer works from tickers on monthly data, which suits anyone testing a specific fund, but is built around US investors. cFIREsim and FIREcalc answer the withdrawal-rate question on US data alone. Come here instead for a non-US home currency, or for the full range of historical outcomes rather than a simulated distribution.