We‘re continuing to update the site. The latest addition is performance charts on the portfolio summary page. Next to each portfolio listing is now a small chart giving you a quick visual of your portfolio performance (up or down) as well as a sense of its volatility. You can also click on these and the familiar full chart of portfolio performance will be displayed.

We debated whether numbers should be included on these small thumbnails to give a sense of scale. In the end though, we opted for the simple uncluttered graphic without any scale.

Tell us what you think!

We‘re continuing to make improvements to the public side of the site (which doesn‘t affect logged in users). However, logged in users should be seeing a better “model portfolio“ selection process in the near future. There has been considerable interest in using our “standard” tested Stockworm strategies. The major complaint though has been how to determine which of these strategies is best for me (or you as the case may be). We‘re hoping to provide some tools to better present these strategies to our users. Have ideas? Any suggestions along these lines are welcome.

In the next few days we‘ll be rolling out a new look. This will only affect the public pages that display when you visit the site but are not logged in.

Once logged in however, everything will still be the same.

For most of you, this will just affect the look of the login screen. If you typically go to www.stockworm.com to log in, look in the upper right corner for “member login“. Click on that and you‘ll be presented with a screen to enter your username and password (as before). Do that and click “submit”. You should then see the familiar Stockworm screens.

We hope the new cleaner fresher look will help new visitors better navigate the site and understand what Stockworm is all about.

If you experience any problems or have any questions, as always, please contact us.

In response to your feedback, the simulation list and results pages have been updated again to include more statistical descriptors for simulations. Specific changes:

1. The average gain for each simulation now includes a coefficient of variation which allows you to determine how consistent the returns are over time.
2. The simulation results now feature standard portfolio measurements of alpha, beta, and r-squared. These measures allow you to determine how your simulated portfolio performed in comparison with the s&p 500 as a benchmark.
3. You can filter lists of simulation results by all of the statistical measure plus some new items such as the market cap and number of stocks in the strategy backing the simulation. This allows you to narrow your list to simulations which match your investment objectives.

For more details, please see the simulation section of the manual.

As promised, the new simulation list page is now available for your use. This new page allows you to quickly analyze all of the simulations which you have run on Stockworm using a variety of statistical measures, including the average annual gain, sharpe ratio, sortino ratio, average portfolio beta, and average annual turnover ratio. All of the aforementioned statistics are listed in the columns of the simulation list table and you can sort all of your simulations by each of these measures.

In addition, a new 'filter' form has been introduced on the left-hand side of the simulation list page. This form allows you to only display simulations which meet your given criteria. As an example, you could list only simulations with a beta of less than 1.1 and a sharpe ratio of greater than 1.0.

We know that these new statistical measures will greatly enhance your ability to compare different simulations and to determine ‘good‘ versus ‘bad‘ strategies, based upon your investing criteria. For more details, please see the simulation section of the manual.

The autoinvestor simulation results page has been updated in response to your feedback in two ways:

1. new simulation statistics have been added and
2. the simulation details for a single day (which you specify) in are listed one at a time, rather than a listed of all of the results.

How does this help you? Well, the simulation statistics are particularly exciting: average annual return (%), sharpe ratio, sortino ratio, average beta, and average annual turnover have been added. These statistics let you dig much deeper into your simulation results in comparison with a simple total gain figure:

• The average annual return allows you to better understand expected returns rather than just an overall gain figure which could come from a few bad years and one really good year.
• the sharpe and sortino ratios allow you to compare your returns to a ‘risk free‘ instrument (the 30 year t-bond) but normalize these returns by risk (standard deviation of portfolio returns).
• the average beta will also give you a feel for portfolio risk, relative to the s&p 500.
• the average annual turnover ratio will give you a better understanding of trading costs.

The second change is the inclusion of full details of the simulation on any given date on the simulation results page. The change allows you to quickly drill down into the simulation results. The previous page format, with a table showing gains for all simulation updates and then a link for details, was slow to load (the table was huge for a long simulation) and was cumbersome to use. We hope that you find the new format to be fast loading and easier to use!

Our next effort will be to integrate some of these new statistical parameters into the simulation list page so that you can sort and/or filter by these parameters.

You can read more about the simulation results page in the manual (link).