They absolutely mangled the UI of portfolio visualizer and put backtesting beyond 10 years behind a paywall :(
Edit: I didn't look at the pricing before reading the top comment, $30 PER MONTH is nuts...
Edit2: Helpful redditors have suggested testfol.io, PortfolioTree and Portfolio Charts as possible alternatives. I will add more here if people have other good suggestions.
Rip I guess I’ll un-favorite it from my safari home page.
I'm really glad this tool was usable and free during the time I was learning about investing. Good times are over for this amazing tool but thankfully don't need it anymore
There is a nice alternative, actually more user friendly. But lacks features.
Bastages.
Farging ice holes... this is farging war!
Moronie enters the chat
The information is so valuable I knew it couldn’t last
This portfolio backtest tool seems good. Check it out: testfolio
This is nice, but portfoliovisualizer had some cool Monte Carlo simulations where you visualize withdrawal rates.
That is what I will miss the most. So many think they are in good shape - until they learn about Monte Carlo sims. Oh well.
Sorry im new to investing, could you explain how this determines SWR? and why people might be screwed after they run it
What I find really interesting is how clear this back tester shows how closely global markets and the S&P 500 actually tracked each other until like 2012. Then in 1 decade, the S&P 500 pulls ahead by like double.
More recent changes are going to show more. You have to look at the logarithmic scale for a more fair comparison. Doing so you see that total world outperformed domestic in the late 80s but almost as much
Obviously though US only (and more specifically, S&P500) is more concentrated than US+intl so if you compare total international to total US you'll be able to see it much better. More concentrated means higher standard deviation so when S&P500 is outperforming it's outperforming by more and when it is underperforming it is underperforming by more
Testfolio is great but unfortutately, there are a lot of funds where the data is not showing correctly on the chart. For example, VTRIX shows an immediate drop on Jan 1, 1988, which is clearly a stock split or capital gain distribution that is not being accounted for.
WOW! I LOVE this one! WAY more accurate! Thanks!!!
When you say it is "WAY more accurate" is it because it displaying daily data? Or is it because you see data inaccuracies with PV data?
The new website is dogshit. A good website does not add more clicks to do simple thing and hide necessary inputs. It also stretches to the whole screen making reading miserable.
Agreed. I have no idea how anyone thought changing the layout to it's current form would be a good idea.
Seems like every single thing we use is fucking up their UI for no reason. So many things look lile mobile layouts for PC and it looks horrible. Enshittification for real.
Maybe for the best, to keep me from tinkering my portfolio with any new wild ideas 😅
Nooooooooooooooooooo
I think these guys are on the brink of bankrupcy, they need to be really desperate to ask $30 monthly from people who maybe run a simulation once every few weeks. Monetization model is just wrong.
Can someone explain to me what this is?
Really? That sucks man!! All good things must come to an end!!
Well shit what are we all switching to? I am pretty new to retirement investing but it seems like everyone uses the ole PV.
Best alternative appears to be testfol.io
The website looks similar to meta and ai stuff now. I dont blame them for the paywall but keep it the same great tool
Companies are terrible at this. Acknolweding that you didn't know you were sitting on value is fine. But don't think you have to drastically change what you do in order to extract that value. It's like they think they can't charge more (Or at all) without looking new and flashy.
Yeah and now you pay money, don’t understand it, and say screw this 😂
wow so different
I am new to investing, so apologies if the answer to this question is obviously. What benefits does everyone find from using back testing portfolios? Is it mainly to decide future investment options? Thanks!
Yes, essentially this, though of course it should always be remembered that macroeconomic conditions might have changed and that past performance never guarantees future returns.
For example if you were just curious how VT (global stocks) vs VOO (US stocks) performed since the 1990s to now, you used to be able to pretty easily show that on portfolio visualizer.
Or maybe you wanted to compare a 100 percent stock allocation vs a 60/40 stock/bond allocation with annual rebalancing and how they would have performed through the dot-com and 2008 financial crashes. You could also easily do that.
Or looking at how much money VOO would have returned but in a situation where you were withdrawing 2% every year.
For all of these and more you could easily get an averaged annualized return over your back-tested period, against a chosen benchmark, what a starting monetary value would have returned (pre or post inflation), alongside other useful information such as the biggest peak to trough drop (drawdown) and recovery date. Very useful in thinking personal appetite for volatility and ability to stay the course! And you could compare up to 3 portfolios at once!
Once you understood the basics of indexing (e.g. a standard 2 fund portfolio of VT and BND) and slowly learnt more and more along your personal journey, another popular thing among some people (though not at all essential!) might have been to tweak your asset allocation 'pie' based off your personal views and risk tolerance in a manner backed by academic literature on investing.
For example, people might want to leverage the whole portfolio slightly, or introduce 'factor tilts' by overweighting market segments such as small cap stocks or international stocks, fiddle within asset classes to compare different products (e.g. QQQ vs VOO, short duration vs long duration treasuries, AVUV vs VBR) or even add more exotic assets like gold or REITS if they thought it would provide value through additional returns or reduced risk.
So yeah, long story short, it's mainly useful if you have an idea and want to see how it might have performed through real economic conditions though with the added context that those conditions might not be the same going forwards.
Is it mainly to decide future investment options?
Basically.
Its main benefit to me was for examining potential retirement asset allocations for when I am actually retired and withdrawing money.
The tool let you see how different portfolios would perform, of course. But it also showed how they behaved with different withdrawal and rebalancing strategies.
For example, you might see that a given portfolio might never ran out of money, and made an excellent return over a 20 year period. Which initially sounds great. But looking at it closer you see that during the first several years it dropped 60% from its starting value before recovering. I am pretty certain that a drop that big would keep me from sleeping at night.
Ugh. I was afraid of this when I saw the footer on PV change from Silicon Cloud Technologies to SRL Global a year or so ago. See the Leadership section of the SRL Global About Us. Tuomo Lampinen – CEO (Analytics) & Chief Data Scientist is the one who created PV originally 10+ years ago. I would link back to some of his original posts on reddit when he first created it but can't find anything due to how search has been neutered.
I wasn't thrilled when they introduced the subscription model in 2020 but since it was one of my most frequently used sites and it worked so well and so fast, I decided to go for it since there isn't anything else that compared. But this change is really disappointing on so many levels. Yes, the data appears to be all there, but it and the new site are a mess.
Edit: After getting over the initial shock of the new site and playing with it a little more, the good news is that all of the information is still there. Obviously if you aren't a subscriber you've lost a lot. From my side as a subscriber, they moved from having data organized under different tabs to having everything on one page with shortcut icons pinned to the left side of the page to jump to the different sections. The bad news is that several tables (Annual Returns, Monthly Returns, and Trades) now require paging which is really annoying.
Edit #2: Some other minor annoyances:
When I go back to the Backtest Portfolio tool it will start from what I had last backtested, even if it is in another tab. This makes it really annoying/challenging to open multiple tabs and do different comparisons because now you have to be careful how you go about it.
Not necessarily an annoyance but CASHX was always PV's risk free rate of return asset and it appears that they have shifted from 1-month treasury bill returns (which was hard to replicate) to 3-month treasury bill returns. Coincidentally I recently switched to 3-month T-Bill returns using DTB3 in some local testing I do for other things and the results are almost identical.
Edit #3: I see they have added a "Legacy UI" button. I'm much happier now.
Testfol.io
It will change your life man. 100 times better than portfolio visualizer.
Can we all share One login??? 😀
The new UI sucks but I'm still getting 50+ years of backtesting for free.
The time period of the results is limited to 10 years for free tier and trial accounts. I’m not
It's because they are using the Backtest Portfolio Asset Class Allocation tool. If you try to use the Backtest Portfolio tool to pick and choose individual funds then you run into the limit.
Montecarlo simulation still be available, so it is fine for now.
I noticed this too. Horrible user interface. Painful and not intuitive. They also removed CASHX, I can’t figure out how to put cash as holding
Moderator account? Shared costs (72 people = $5/yr). Insert request data onto a spreadsheet. Results get shared and avoid duplications. Just a thought…
Most likely 100% against the terms of use.
Yeah damn. I tried to use this last night and was very confused.
I’m not surprised they’re charging for this but damn $30 / month!
Anyone know of any alternatives?
Terrible, the UI is awful and confusing to navigate. This was a great tool, what a shame.
Portfoliotree and testfolio are worth checking out
Yeah definitely not paying $30/mo for that…
Enshittification
How is it that everyone collectively knows what app/program/website you're using? Who the fuck is "they?"
“Portfolio Visualizer” is its actual name: https://portfoliovisualizer.com
What did I need to visualize about FXAIX and chill?
Noooooo
One of my best tool to see historical records. Is there any other web sites offering similar tools ?
Just discovered this myself and am SO disappointed!!! I used it all the time!
Darn, guess I was lucky to use it last week to research a few different portfolio scenarios. Glad I took screenshots for reference material.
Welp, I started building a somewhat complex compound interest web app recently, mainly just for some practice with a new to me framework. Might have to consider expanding the scope of my project…
Yeah over 10 years behind a pay wall is really dumb.
glad i got to spend the time i did with the previous version. Had loads of fun looking at different scenarios. RIP
"Look how they massacred my boy..."
I guess they need to pay for all that data history, hosting etc... what's free nowadays?
I use Diversiview (diversiview.online) as I'm in Australia, so all AUS stocks but they also cover US and Indian stocks, also Indian mutual funds. Interesting model as well, 1st portfolio analysis is free and they have a credit points system if you want to run more. Worth having a look. Also portfolio imports from many international brokers.
What a shame. I loved that site
This is indeed sad. I used the free version of PV to build several successful investment systems. I'm actually surprised it took them this long to wall it off.
Nothing can be free these days. Idiots always looking to cash in on people.
Anything self hosted?
Peak bogleheads- wanting it all for free and bitching when it’s not given to us.
It is paid for, by our fees.
Absolutely horrible.
Today is the death of portfoliovisualizer.
The price is absolutely ridiculous. I‘m not an advisor and do some backtests just for fun. I‘m not gonna pay fucking 30 bucks per months for that.
(Also the UI is uber shit and has terrible overview)