Acorns Backtest
This is a repost of an old article that I did as an Acorns backtest. Only difference is that that time I did it in RStudio and exported it out as html. My static blog generator under Windows Linux Subsystem does not like it. This is a port over to Jupyter Notebook which Nicola natively supports.
Synopsis
I have been an investor in Acorns since around September 2017. I learned about Acorns as a “Millenial savings account.” I did a “why not” investing. Plus I like squirreling away money that is not visible to me or others.
I had chosen the “Aggressive Portfolio” instead of the recommended “Conservative Portfolio.” The reason was that I was adviced long ago that my Social Security and Pension was my bond fund.
Purpose of this post is to backtest the Acorns investment style in a reproducible way reasonably. I will admit that the backtest is flawed and oversimplified. Acorns rebalances every time you add money Acorns. Also, Acorns does a full rebalance every quarter. I will not capture tax implications. The starting date will be from January 1st, 2011 till the time of this post. The reason is that the first data for VOO is September 2010. I hope that this will have value for you.
- Large Company - VOO
- Small Company - VB
- Developed Market - VEA
- Emerging Market - VWO
- Real Estate - VNQ
- Corporate Bond - LQD
- Government Bond - SHY
- Spiders - SPY benchmark.
- ^IRX - 13 WEEK TREASURY BILL as risk free rate