Setting up a portfolio

Portfolio setup is the first stage of building a portfolio. It defines the portfolio's basic parameters—its name and base currency—and the overarching settings the rest of the build relies on. Only a name is required to continue—the currency is pre-filled with your account's base currency, and everything else has a sensible default.

The name uniquely identifies the portfolio across the platform, and cannot be changed once you continue past setup. The base currency is the currency every metric is reported in: each asset held in a different currency is converted to it before the portfolio is calculated. Choose the base currency of your brokerage account to see performance from your own perspective, or the currency of most of the assets you intend to hold. How that conversion works is covered in Currency and FX handling.

Setup also includes an Advanced section, collapsed by default. The defaults are sensible for most portfolios, so you can leave it closed; open it only when you need finer control over how the portfolio is built. The backtest start date, for example, defaults to the end of the calendar year roughly ten years back. The individual options are documented in Advanced settings, Transaction costs, and Currency and FX handling.

Once the name and currency are set, continue to selecting assets, then to controlling the asset allocation. For an overview of the whole build process, see How we build portfolios; for guidance on picking or building a portfolio, see Choosing your portfolio. Once built, the portfolio's results open in the portfolio summary, and the portfolio lives on the Portfolios Overview from then on—see Managing your portfolios.