Why is determining an Asset Allocation one of the most important decisions you will make when setting up and maintaining your portfolio? With our new interactive asset allocation calculator, you can find out. See how different allocations to stocks, bonds, REITs and gold would have affected your portfolio over the last 3 decades.
Compare two different asset allocations using the calculator below. Enter the % of each asset in the corresponding grey box and see how small or large changes in asset allocations would have affected your portfolio’s historic return.
The asset allocation calculator data starts with 1972 and goes through the end of 2015 (as time goes on, more and more data should be added). Also see the portfolio’s total compounded growth, best and worst years of performance for each asset allocation and total growth of $100 since 1972 for each asset allocation.
Note: “Long term treasuries” are 10 year bonds, “Short term treasuries” are 3 month bills.
Think 100% stocks or 100% gold would have been your best investment over the last 30 years? Think again.
This calculator helps highlight the benefits that diversification can have for your portfolio. Play around with the numbers yourself and see what you find.
Some interesting statistics:
- The single best annual return of any asset class is gold in 1979, up 133%!
However, a portfolio of 100% gold would have underperformed nearly any portfolio with a balanced amount of stocks, REITs and bonds.
- Single worst annual performance of any asset class is REITs in 1974, down 42%.
And yet 80% stock/20% REIT outperformed 100% stocks.
Of course, past performance in no guarantee for future returns. This calculator can not estimate the returns of your portfolio in the future.
What this calculator does do is help show the benefits of diversification, historical volatility of certain asset classes and help investors see how different asset classes perform during different economic conditions.
The data used for this calculator comes from many sources:
- S&P 500 , short term treasury and long term treasury data comes from Aswath Damodaran on his website here: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/datafile/histretSP.html
Thank you for your work collecting this data and making it available!
- REIT data comes from the FTSE NARIET All REIT index, found here: http://www.reit.com/DataAndResearch/IndexData.aspx
- Gold prices come from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis’s FRED application, found here: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/
Over time I would like to replace S&P 500 data with a much broader stock index such as the Wilshire 5000 and add foreign stocks as well along with some measurements of the asset allocation’s risk/volatility…check back for updates!
