Asset glossary

• Asset: any instrument pfolio holds price data for—an ETF, stock, index, currency, future, or one you build yourself. Assets are the units a portfolio selects from and the database is built from.
• Asset data: the cleaned daily price series, Close and Adj Close, that every metric for an asset is calculated from. How raw data becomes this series is covered in processing asset data.
• Asset attributes: the metadata that categorises an asset—its name, asset class, type, currency, and geography, plus summary figures such as yield and market cap. See asset attributes.
• Asset ticker: the identifier that uniquely names an asset across the platform. It is fixed when the asset is added and cannot be changed afterwards; left blank in the Asset Builder, pfolio generates one.
• Asset list: a named collection of assets, used to organise the database, compare assets, and define a portfolio's investable universe. See managing asset lists, and the catalogue of provided lists in our asset lists.
• Owner and ownership: who created an asset, shown in the Owner column. You can edit or delete only the assets you own; pfolio's preloaded assets are read-only, and to change one you build a new asset on top of it.

• Close vs Adj Close: the two price series pfolio keeps for every asset. Close tracks daily price movement; Adj Close tracks total return, including reinvested distributions such as dividends and interest. See processing asset data.
• Data quality: the health checks on a processed series—filled days, the largest daily moves, and the gap between Close and Adj Close—reported in the Data Quality table so a series can be vetted before its metrics are relied on. See processing asset data.

• Data provider: the route for adding an asset that is already listed and priced externally, by entering its Yahoo Finance ticker; pfolio then downloads the price history and refreshes it daily. See adding an asset from a data source.
• Import: the route for bringing in price data you hold yourself, by file path or upload. See importing an asset.
• Created asset: an asset built from assets already in your database rather than downloaded or imported—a transformation, a synthetic asset, or a continuous future. See creating an asset.

• Asset transformation: a reshaping applied to an existing asset that produces a new asset and leaves the original untouched. Five are available—backfill, leverage, fee, yield, and currency conversion—and they stack in any combination. See all asset transformations.
• Backfill: extending an asset's history backwards with a second asset, so a short live record can be studied over a longer period. A backfilled asset is marked Extended and takes the _e ticker suffix.
• Leverage: scaling an asset's daily returns by a factor between −5x and 5x; a negative factor inverts them to simulate a short position.
• Fee: an annual cost drag applied to an asset's series, so it reflects fee-inclusive performance.
• Yield: the income return of an asset—the gap between its total return, tracked by Adj Close, and its price-only return, tracked by Close—set as a fixed annual figure or nowcast from recent data.
• Currency conversion: re-expressing an asset in another currency, simulating the experience of an investor whose home currency differs from the asset's. The same idea at the portfolio level is covered in currency and FX handling.

• Synthetic asset: a blend of up to five existing assets held at a constant allocation, combined into one daily series that is rebalanced daily back to fixed weights. See building synthetic assets.
• Continuous future: a single continuous price series stitched from a chain of expiring futures contracts, which simulates holding and rolling the position over time. See building continuous futures contracts.
• Futures roll: selling an expiring futures contract and buying the next one along the chain to keep exposure beyond expiry. Repeating it is what a continuous future simulates.

The general metric definitions—Sharpe ratio, volatility, and the rest—live in the metrics we use.