Tool · portfolio lab
A passive portfolio of US-listed Vanguard ETFs, held for 30 years. Pick an account size, a residence, one of 57 priced broker accounts and a rebalancing calendar: the fee engine of our research has already priced every combination, and your browser draws 2,000 paths from 43 years of monthly history to show what the costs do to the result.
Loading the price table.
Each sleeve i drifts with its price return and pays its distribution yield y_i in cash, which waits, earning nothing, until the next rebalance. Every 12/f months (f rebalances a year) the portfolio is set back to its weights w_i, one order per sleeve:
The orders q_{i,\tau} come from the sleeves' real history, 1982-05 to 2024-12, at each of the four calendars. The turnover they give, buys and sells together, in % of the account a year:
For an account A at broker b, averaged over the K historical rebalances, each order priced at its own size and share price s_i on the broker's surveyed grid c_b:
\phi_b is the broker's FX cost, paid on every trade by a Swiss investor whose account is in francs; \sigma_b the Swiss stamp duty, 0.15% on foreign securities, owed only at a Swiss securities dealer; \kappa_b custody and account fees, and the inactivity fee of a year without an order. The first purchase is a one-off: one order per sleeve, the whole account converted. The page computes none of this: the fee engine of our research (s151/broker_costs.py) priced all 12,312 cells.
The US withholds 15% of what a US fund distributes to a resident of Switzerland. Switzerland credits it against Swiss tax, but not when the year's non-recoverable foreign taxes stay at or under CHF 100: then all of it is lost. That is why the withholding line jumps between two account sizes. For the other investor no home credit is counted.
A stationary block bootstrap (Politis and Romano, 1994) of the portfolio's monthly gross history, mean block 12 months, 2,000 paths, the same draws for both brokers. The history keeps its volatility, its fat tails and its crashes; its mean is replaced by the gross return g you set:
\rho(W) is the engine's cost of a year, as a share of the account, at the largest of the nine sizes the account has reached, so a growing account moves down the fee grid. The default gross return is the history's own, not a forecast.
Research, not advice. Every fee comes from the broker's own price list, read on the date shown next to it; prices change. Past returns do not predict future ones.