I've been a DIY investor since 2007, when I started by picking individual stocks. By 2009, after struggling to know what to buy next or when to sell (and racking up some bad picks) I sold everything and went all-in on the much simpler long-term index fund investing. I've stuck with this simple, automated, hands-off approach ever since.
Thing is, while this approach has worked very well for me, it's also, well, boring.
I've regularly felt tempted to stray from the proven strategy. Rather than let that urge derail my long-term plan, I decided to acknowledge it and contain it. I gave myself permission to set aside 10-15% as "fun money", a playground where I can experiment with different strategies and scratch that itch to tinker without putting my serious savings at risk. So apart from my core global index fund, I now have various satellite portfolios where I make sector bets, try leveraged ETFs, lower risk strategies, and more. Will I actually beat the market long term? Odds are I will not, but having fun trying.
I genuinely enjoy learning about investment strategies and exploring how to build my own based on my own risk profile and investment time horizon. I used some of the backtesting tools out in the market to construct portfolios. They mostly worked great, but there were portfolios I could not create with the European UCITS ETFs I was looking for, or data was incomplete.
So I thought, why not combine this with something I hadn't done in years but also loved, developing web applications and building products? I decided to challenge myself to build something from scratch: an(other) European ETF backtesting tool that solved my own needs, but also making it public with features enabling others to create their own portfolios as well.
I'm hoping others find this useful, excited to see and learn what portfolios you all create and experiment with. I believe we can all learn and be inspired from each other, and why I decided as a feature that all portfolios on the site are public and can be compared to each other. Your identity remains anonymous unless they choose otherwise by mentioning it.
An important note on the data, the assets you can use to build portfolios are ETFs with the market data from the exchanges they trade on. Since most UCITS ETFs are relatively young, the backtests have limited history. While these shorter timeframes still offer valuable insights (like portfolio mechanics, relative comparisons, and behavioral patterns) we can't reliably estimate expected long-term returns or draw definitive long-term conclusions. I haven't tried extending the backtests using underlying index data, but I could look into developing that feature down the line if demand and data is there.
I've loved building this so far, and I'd genuinely welcome your ideas for new features or feedback on what's working (or not working). Fair warning: I'm not a financial expert and have no formal finance background, nor a professional developer, I'm learning by doing as I go, just like many of you.