DIY investing, done right

pfolio offers DIY investors professionally built, well-diversified portfolios optimised for risk-adjusted returns that are simple to invest in through your own broker account.

How investing with pfolio compares to other approaches:

• Buy & hold: Higher risk-adjusted returns than buy & hold
• Robo-advisor: Lower fees & more flexibility than robo-advisors
• Value investing or stock picking: Lower time & emotional involvement than value investing or stock picking

Everybody needs to find the investment approach that best meets their needs & goals. However, we firmly believe that investing with pfolio offers a unique combination of high risk-adjusted returns, high flexibility, low fees with limited time & emotional involvement.

pfolio provides you with portfolios that you can invest in by yourself.

How it works:

1. Design: Choose one of our portfolios or design your own portfolio based on your investment criteria, such as risk level, asset class, or geographical exposure.
2. Build: Based on your portfolio design, we build your portfolio to meet your investment criteria. Every rebalancing period (normally monthly), our algorithm selects a set of assets & calculates the optimal allocation to each asset.
3. Invest: We provide you with the allocation of each asset in your portfolio. You trade accordingly through your broker or exchange. As we update the allocations every rebalancing period, you trade to reflect those changes.
   

pfolio builds portfolios to maximise risk-adjusted returns given various constraints, such as risk level or asset class constraints.

pfolio uses proprietary algorithms and utilises Nobel Prize-winning Modern Portfolio Theory for portfolio optimisation.

The portfolio building process is a little bit like cooking: In the first step, the portfolio design, the user defines the portfolio's ingredients, e.g. the desired risk level, the universe of assets from which the portfolio can be built, amongst other parameters.

Based on the user-defined portfolio design, our algorithm generates a recipe for how to construct the portfolio.

Every rebalancing period (normally monthly), our algorithm executes the recipe and selects a set of assets as well as calculates the optimal allocation to each asset for the upcoming period.

The asset selection, amongst other things, takes into account recent performance as well as correlations to other selected assets to arrive at a set of assets that are well-performing as well as diversified.

The asset allocation calculates each asset's weight in the portfolio according to Modern Portfolio Theory, i.e. constructs a portfolio on the Efficient Frontier.

This approach results in high-performing, well-diversified portfolios with reduced large drawdowns.

You should select your portfolio based on your investment criteria.

Within pfolio, you can express your investment criteria by selecting different options from various categories. In our view, the main categories with example options are:

• Risk level: Your portfolio's volatility
• Asset class: Equity, fixed income, cryptocurrency, ...
• Asset type: ETF, stock, future, ...
• Geography: Country development (developed, emerging, ...), region (North America, Europe, Asia, ...)

You can select one of pfolio's portfolios that meets your investment criteria or you can design your own portfolio with various additional options.

If you are unsure about your investment criteria, we recommend you choose our globally diversified, all ETF, medium volatility portfolio.

You can invest with pfolio by mirroring your pfolio portfolio in your own trading account.

As pfolio does not invest for you, you need your own broker account (e.g. with Interactive Brokers, TD Ameritrade, E-Trade, Robinhood, TradeRepublic). If cryptocurrencies are part of your portfolio, you might also need an account with one of the cryptocurrency exchanges (e.g. Binance, Coinbase, Kraken).

pfolio displays every portfolio's allocation to each underlying asset. A simplified example allocation could be: 25% AAPL, 50% MSFT, 25% AMZN.

The allocations change with every rebalance period (typically monthly) and pfolio will provide you with trading instructions for you to follow, e.g. sell 25 shares of AAPL & buy 15 shares of MSFT.

The main difference is that a robo-advisor invests for you while pfolio is a platform that helps you to invest by yourself.

This brings with it broadly three main differences:

• Fees: Robo-advisors (typically) charge a management fee that is a percent of your assets under management which can be a significant drag on performance; pfolio charges a fixed monthly fee that does not scale with your assets
• Flexibility: Robo-advisors are walled gardens that provide you with limited portfolio options & investable assets; pfolio is an open platform that gives you great flexibility with regards to portfolio building & integration in your investment workflow
• Involvement: Investing with a robo-advisor, once set-up, runs by itself; investing with pfolio is more involved as you have to execute the required trades by yourself, this typically takes a couple of hours per month

It ultimately depends on your preferences and how you prioritise various factors for your investment approach.

As you are already managing your own investments, you are already familiar with the buying & selling of assets, which is a great prerequisite for investing with pfolio.

Regardless of your current approach, pfolio can offer you a data-driven investment strategy that leaves emotions out of the investment process.

You might as well use our Insights tool to inform your own investment decisions. As an open platform, you can also onboard your strategy's data and get detailed performance & risk metrics.

Being new to investing is not a reason against using pfolio or, more broadly, against managing your own investments.

With todays investing infrastructure, it is easier than ever to get started. All you need is a broker account and you are ready to start buying & selling of securities.

The more general question is whether or not you want to manage your own investments, which is more involved, but provides greater flexibility and the potential for higher performance.

We founded pfolio to minimise the downsides of DIY investing while maximising the upsides. If you want to manage your own investments, pfolio is there to support you with diversified portfolios and simple trading instructions.

Investing with pfolio typically takes a couple of hours per month for portfolio rebalancing.

While we think that time spent on trading should be kept to a necessary minimum, we encourage everyone to engage in continuous learning to become a better investor.

pfolio supports any asset class and any financial instrument as long, as at least, the asset's daily close price is available.

There are three sources of asset data within pfolio:

• pfolio asset data: pfolio provides asset data for all major financial instruments incl. ETFs, US & intl. stocks, futures, currencies, cryptocurrencies & indices with historical data going back to the 1930s for some assets
• Build your own asset: pfolio provides extensive functionality to build your own asset, e.g. build continuous futures by chaining together individual futures contracts with various settings, build synthetic ETFs with different a base currency as the original, or build synthetic stocks that incorporate borrowing fees
• Import your own asset: You can also import your own asset data, e.g. for a trading strategy that you have been working on or for an asset that is not available within pfolio

pfolio provides asset data that is more than sufficient for most investors. However, if you want to go beyond the provided data, we offer the tools to build or import additional data.

Yes, as an open platform, pfolio provides import & export options to integrate into your investment workflow.

• Import your own asset: You can import your own asset data, e.g. for a trading strategy that you have been working on or for an asset that is not available within pfolio
• Export asset data: You can export asset data, e.g. for a portfolio that you have build within pfolio, for further usage outside of the pfolio platform

Further features to interface with the pfolio platform are planned, e.g. a Metrics API to test your strategies with detailed performance & risk metrics outside of pfolio.