We've just rolled out a few improvements to our Sortino Ratio calculations, giving you the most accurate downside risk analysis available in any investment platform today.

**Why Downside Risk Matters More Than Total Risk**

The Sortino Ratio is one of the most powerful metrics for serious investors. Unlike the [Sharpe Ratio](https://portfolioslab.com/tools/sharpe-ratio), which penalizes both upside and downside volatility equally, the Sortino Ratio focuses exclusively on downside risk - the volatility that actually hurts your returns.

This distinction is critical: you want assets that protect your capital during market downturns, not assets that simply have low volatility in both directions.

**Multi-Period Analysis: See the Complete Picture**

PortfoliosLab now calculates Sortino Ratios across four time horizons:

* **1-Year Sortino** - Current downside protection performance
* **5-Year Sortino** - Medium-term risk profile through market cycles
* **10-Year Sortino** - Long-term downside characteristics
* **All-Time Sortino** - Complete historical perspective

**Why This Changes Your Analysis**

Short-term metrics can be deceiving. An asset with an impressive 1-year Sortino might be riding a favorable market cycle, while its 10-year performance tells a different story. Here's what multi-period analysis reveals:

* **Identify True Defensive Assets**: Assets that maintain strong Sortino Ratios across all time periods have proven downside protection, not just recent luck.
* **Spot Regime Changes**: A deteriorating Sortino from 10Y to 1Y signals increasing downside risk—perfect for rebalancing decisions or exit strategies.
* **Build All-Weather Portfolios**: Combine assets with strong long-term Sortino Ratios to construct portfolios that protect capital through different market environments.
* **Time Your Entries**: Assets with improving Sortino trends (stronger 1Y vs 5Y) may indicate recovery phases with reduced downside risk.

**Industry-Leading Calculation Accuracy**

We've rebuilt our Sortino engine using calendar-based lookback periods instead of observation-based counting. Here's why this matters:

Most platforms calculate "1-year" metrics by counting trading days (typically 252 observations). But 252 trading days means different things for different assets:

* US stocks: \~12 months (252 trading days)
* Cryptocurrencies: \~8 months (trades 365 days/year)
* International stocks: varies by market holidays
* Thinly-traded securities: 14+ months to reach 252 trades

PortfoliosLab now uses exact calendar periods, so 365 days means 365 days for every asset, whether it's a stock, crypto, bond, or commodity. This ensures:

* **Fair comparisons** between traditional and alternative assets
* **Accurate cross-market analysis** regardless of trading calendars
* **Consistent portfolio metrics** when mixing asset classes
* **Reliable screening results** across global securities

When you compare a tech stock to Bitcoin on PortfoliosLab, you're comparing true risk-adjusted returns over identical time periods - something most platforms simply cannot deliver.

**Put It to Work**

All four Sortino metrics are now live in our advanced screeners. Filter, rank, and discover securities based on proven downside protection across any time horizon you choose.

The data is already calculated and ready for every symbol with sufficient history, no manual work to calculate the metrics.

**Start Screening Now**

Ready to discover assets with superior downside protection? Our enhanced screeners are waiting:

* [Stock Screener](https://portfolioslab.com/screener/stock) - Screen 10,000+ US equities by multi-period Sortino Ratios
* [ETF Screener](https://portfolioslab.com/screener/etf) - Find defensive ETFs with proven downside protection
* [Mutual Fund Screener](https://portfolioslab.com/screener/mutualfund) - Compare funds by their true risk-adjusted performance

Want to calculate Sortino Ratios for your own portfolio? Try our [Sortino Ratio Calculator](https://portfolioslab.com/tools/sortino-ratio) with the same industry-leading accuracy that powers our platform.

We've enhanced our Sortino Ratio calculations with multi-period analysis (1Y, 5Y, 10Y, All-Time) and improved accuracy for true cross-asset comparability.

Multi-Period Sortino Ratios and Improved Precision

One of the most common requests we’ve received over the past few months was the ability to benchmark a portfolio against another portfolio — not just against an index or ETF.

Today, we’re excited to introduce **Portfolios as Benchmark**, a new feature that makes this possible. You can now directly compare two portfolios side-by-side, test different strategies, and visualize which allocation performs better over time.

**Why We Built It**

Until now, benchmarking on PortfoliosLab was limited to indices or single assets. That worked well for high-level context — comparing your portfolio to the [S&amp;P 500](https://portfolioslab.com/symbol/^GSPC), for instance — but it didn’t fully capture the way investors actually think about strategies.

Many of our users manage or track **multiple portfolios**: long-term vs. tactical, traditional vs. factor-based, passive vs. active, or even personal experiments in asset allocation. Being able to evaluate these portfolios against each other provides a much deeper understanding of how each strategy behaves under the same conditions.

We built this feature because investment analysis isn’t just about beating the market — it’s about learning what *works better* for a given objective.

**What You Can Do With Portfolios as Benchmark**

With this update, you can now:

* **Compare two custom portfolios directly.**
  Select any existing lazy portfolio or your custom portfolio as the benchmark and visualize relative performance over time.
* **Test competing strategies.**
  For example, see how a traditional [60/40 stock–bond mix](https://portfolioslab.com/portfolio/stocks-bonds-60-40) stacks up against an [all-weather portfolio](https://portfolioslab.com/portfolio/ray-dalio-all-weather).
* **Evaluate portfolio improvements.**
  Clone and tweak your existing portfolio (e.g., change weights or add an asset) to see how the modification impacts performance when benchmarked against the original.
* **Understand relative risk and return.**
  Analyze drawdowns, volatility, and returns not just in isolation but relative to the strategy you care about most.



<img height="538" width="712" src="https://portfolioslab.com/static/user-content/1/obehnasi786wjy08140gi7zc.png" />



**Why It Matters**

This new capability turns portfolio analysis into an interactive experiment. You can now explore questions like:

* Which allocation performs best across different market regimes?
* How much diversification benefit does a complex strategy really provide?
* Does quarterly rebalancing outperform buy-and-hold for my mix?

By putting portfolios side-by-side, the answers become clearer — supported by data, not intuition.

**Getting Started**

You’ll find the new benchmark selector right under the **Portfolio Allocation** section.
Simply open any portfolio, select benchmark agains portfolio, and choose another portfolio from your account.

<img height="70" width="716" src="https://portfolioslab.com/static/user-content/1/q1onyttuz8zlpxssoy8owd0k.png" />

The comparison updates instantly, showing cumulative returns, risk metrics, and drawdown charts in a familiar, intuitive interface.

We’re continuing to expand the ways you can analyze and compare investment strategies on PortfoliosLab. If you have ideas or feedback about how you’d like to use Portfolios as Benchmark, we’d love to hear from you — your input directly shapes what we build next.

PortfoliosLab’s new Portfolios as Benchmark feature lets you directly compare two portfolios side-by-side, testing strategies and visualizing performance, risk, and drawdowns.

Introducing Portfolios as Benchmark

A ticker is easy to revisit but the reasoning behind it is not. Why you started watching a company, which assumption mattered most, what changed after the last earnings report. All those details usually end up scattered across documents, bookmarks, and browser tabs. When you return to the symbol a few weeks later, the numbers are still there, but the context is gone.

We added **Symbol Notes** so your research stays next to the asset it belongs to. Open any symbol page and choose the new **Notes** tab. You can save multiple private notes with formatted text, lists, links, and screenshots. Notes can be edited or deleted as your view changes.

<img height="267" width="622" src="https://portfolioslab.com/static/user-content/1/y4dkv1i93v7738l3zqvst49v.png" />

The note count appears directly in the symbol navigation, so you can see whether you already recorded something before continuing the research. Everything is private to your account.

This works for any symbol on PortfoliosLab. You might keep an investment thesis next to a stock, save a chart on an ETF, record a question to revisit after the next report, or preserve the source behind a number that looked important. A current metric shows what an asset looks like today but notes preserve what you thought when you first looked at it. When you return later, you can compare an old assumption with new results and see whether the evidence moved or only the price did.

### One research log across every symbol

The easily access all your saved notes we added the new **My Notes** page that brings them together in one place, grouped by symbol and ordered by the most recent update.

You can filter the list by ticker or company name, review the latest notes for each symbol, and edit or delete them without returning to every individual page.

<img height="481" width="615" src="https://portfolioslab.com/static/user-content/1/mfl3c2ea2hbego6fn2eetuzh.png" />

This keeps the research workflow connected. [Screen a symbol](/screener/stock), [compare it with alternatives](/symbol/VOO/alternatives), review its risk and return, then save the context you want to remember on the same page

### Availability

Private Symbol Notes are live now and available to every signed-in user.

You can now save private research notes and context directly alongside any asset

Keep Your Investment Research with Private Symbol Notes

Your broker shows your portfolio return, but few show where it came from. A 20% return could come from a single lucky bet or from growth spread evenly across all your holdings and that's a big difference. The same return can rest on very different foundations: broad participation across holdings, or one position explaining most of the result. We added **Portfolio Growth Contribution** to [Portfolio Performance](/tools/portfolio-performance) to show which one you're actually holding.

The new waterfall chart breaks total portfolio growth into the contribution from each holding. Positive bars add to growth, negative bars detract from it, and together they sum to the portfolio total.

<img height="417" width="633" src="https://portfolioslab.com/static/user-content/1/wp8yg0bzl829lvqo47nvwxiq.png" />

*The portfolio returned +15.39% over 5Y. VTI contributed +19.04% while TLT dragged −14.77%. Without contribution, you'd never see that a single bond position nearly erased all your equity gains.*

Contribution is different from a holding's standalone return. It combines a position's performance with its weight in the portfolio and accounts for drift and rebalancing. Hover over a bar to see its average allocation for the selected period. Switch between YTD, 1Y, 5Y, 10Y, and Max to see whether the drivers changed over time.

It also separates a weak holding from a real portfolio drag. A single position can plunge and barely move the result because its allocation was small; another can fall less but matter far more because it was a core holding. You see what actually moved your portfolio before making the next allocation decision.

**Availability**

Portfolio Growth Contribution is live now for standard portfolios in [Portfolio Performance.](/tools/portfolio-performance) YTD and 1Y views are available to Free users. Plus, Pro, and Max users can also compare 5Y, 10Y, and full-history results. The contribution chart supports only static portfolios at release.

PortfoliosLab's new waterfall chart shows how much each holding contributed to your total portfolio return, so you can see what actually drove or dragged performance.

See What's Driving Your Portfolio Returns

PortfoliosLab pages can be dense. A symbol or portfolio analysis may include returns, drawdowns, risk-adjusted ratios, benchmark metrics, dividends, correlations, and much more. That is useful data, but it is not always easy to interpret or turn into a clear next question.

We added **Copy for AI** to make that workflow simpler.

### What we added

Symbol pages, portfolio pages, and stock comparison pages now include a **Copy for AI** button. It turns the current page into clean markdown context that you can paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI chat.

<img height="207" width="605" src="https://portfolioslab.com/static/user-content/1/haewimuuv5azrwaswl9yd4uy.png" />

The copied output is structured for analysis rather than screenshots. It includes labeled sections, exact metric names, date ranges, benchmark settings, and tables where the data needs to be compared side by side.

That matters because AI tools are much more useful when they are grounded in the actual numbers. Without providing exact context to AI, you can never tell if it's guessing or not. If the model does not know the benchmark, time period, risk-free rate, drawdown history, or correlation data, it may fill in the gaps. So instead of asking a model to infer from a screenshot or a few manually typed metrics, you can give it the full analytical context and ask a sharper question.

It also makes PortfoliosLab analysis more interactive. You can start with the platform's calculations, then use AI to explore the interpretation: what changed, what looks fragile, what is redundant, and what scenario would hurt the portfolio most.

### What you can ask

Copy for AI is useful when you want a second pass on the data. You can ask it to explain a metric, challenge a thesis, compare trade-offs, or stress-test a portfolio against a specific scenario.

For example, after copying a semiconductor ETF page, you might ask why a one-year Sharpe ratio looks exceptional while the all-time Sharpe ratio is much lower. After copying a portfolio, you might ask whether ten holdings are genuinely diversified or mostly one sector bet. After copying a stock comparison, you might ask whether the extra return is worth the extra drawdown and volatility.

<img height="326" width="637" src="https://portfolioslab.com/static/user-content/1/o9fjuge6mof87ntiu34g5gal.png" />

You can also check [documentation](/docs/getting-started/analyze-with-ai) page with prompt examples and sample copied output.

**Availability**

Copy for AI is available on Plus and Pro plans.

Symbol, portfolio, and comparison pages can now be copied as structured markdown context for ChatGPT or Claude

Platform Updates

Discussions by tag platform updates