About
This site was built as a financial education tool to help individuals better understand the potential benefits of long-term investing, while also understanding the risks involved. There is plently of financial information online, but most of it is geared towards US investors. I built this site to help both US and non-US investors get educated about passive investments.
What can I do with this website?
The Backtesting Tool lets you:
- Choose an asset allocation and simulate it on historical data.
- Calculate the performance in your own local currency. Most of the historical information online is intended for US investors, which is not accurate for international investors due to changing currency exchange rates.
- Build a composite portfolio relevant for your own country. For example, a common choice is to invest in locally-issued bonds as the conservative part of the portfolio (and not, say, in US-issued bonds).
What can't I do with it?
This site advocates passive investments. It does not:
- Let you choose individual stocks.
- Let you simulate daily trading strategies.
- Predict the future. Only historical performance is shown.
- Give recommendations for stocks or other investments. One must build his own financial plan based on age, financial situation and personal goals.
What is passive investment?
Passive investment is a methodology for long-term investment that seeks to track a broad-market index such as the S&P 500, or even a global index. A passive investor will usually buy a mutual fund or an ETF that tracks such a benchmark and hold it for a long period of time, minimizing trading fees and taxes. A passive investor's portfolio might be composed of multiple funds tracking several indexes. Passive investment is simple, efficient and often provides superior results for individual investors over the long term. Read more at Investopedia.
Where can I learn more?
A comprehensive source of information is the Bogleheads Wiki. Some good books that advocate passive investments are The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing, A Random Walk Down Wall Street and The Little Book of Common Sense Investing. A great video on the subject is The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins.
Why "Pumbaa"?
I named this site after Simba's backtesting spreadsheet - a massive Excel spreadsheet for analyzing historical returns of various portfolios. For US investors it is extremely comprehensive, even more than this site.
How does it work?
Data for popular mutual funds, ETFs and indices is collected daily from around the internet. To keep this tool free, the data is collected from many open sources, such as asset management companies, stock exchanges and central banks.
I can't find an ETF or a mutual fund!
Let me know at dev@pumbaa.app and I'll try to add it! Keep in mind that I will not add quotes for individual stocks, only assets that track broad-market indices, preferably ones that have existed for 15+ years.
How can I help?
As a user, please send feedback, comments and feature requests to dev@pumbaa.app
As a knowledgable investor, you can help me expand the examples page to more countries, or to include additional educating examples.