[Bostonian]

Thanks for posting. I tried it with stock and bond ETFs SPY and IEF and got the result

"If you had invested $20/week evenly in these assets for the past 5 years, you'd have invested $5,200.00 and have $5,638.09 today, a return of 1.1X."

Usually that would be expressed as a return of 10%, and the return would be reported to the nearest percent. It would nice to allow the user to specify unequal weightings, say $15/week in SPY and $5 in IEF.

A general problem with showing the results of a dollar-cost averaging investment plan is that it gives more weight to later returns in the period, since that is when the most money was invested. It's true that people who are starting from $0 and saving regularly from earnings face this risk. Another simulation that is worth showing is having the full amount invested from the beginning.

I assume you are familiar with https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/ , a comprehensive investment simulator (that is not a mobile app).

[dwmcc]

Hey, thanks for taking a look! The tool you linked looks quite comprehensive, but we wanted to build something simple and approachable for beginners.

Good callout on custom-weighting, that's on the list to add in the future.

[intrasight]

I don't understand your "a general problem" statement. I would not consider it a problem to show correct results. Someone saving for retirement just wants to know the course-grained results. Having the chart split those results by the period that funds were invested would make for a very visually cluttered chart. But I agree that it would be interesting to some.

A few years back, I created a simulator that let's you simulate both putting money in - lump sum and incrementally - and also take money out. I'll see if I can find a link to a live version.

[ctchocula]

Agree with the first point. Either time-weighted return or IRR gives a more meaningful estimate of the return than simply dividing the final value with total amount invested ($5,200).

[Havoc]

The 1.1x is money on money convention