Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the numbers on this site — no finance degree required. For the exact formulas, see the methodology.

The basics

Fund: A single pooled investment (a mutual fund or ETF) that holds many stocks or bonds so you don't have to pick them one by one.
Index fund: A fund that simply tries to match a market index (like the S&P 500 — the 500 largest US companies) instead of trying to beat it. Usually the cheapest way to own the whole market.
Benchmark: The yardstick you measure a fund against. On this site you can pick any benchmark — the S&P 500, a bond index, or even another fund.
Expense ratio: The fund's annual fee, as a % of your money. 0.03% is $3/year per $10,000; 1.00% is $100/year. Lower is better, and it compounds — small differences matter a lot over decades.
Yield: The income (dividends or interest) a fund pays out over a year, as a % of its price. A 3% yield on $10,000 is about $300/year.

Return & risk

Total return: How much you'd have made over a period, counting both price change and reinvested dividends.
Annualized return: That total return expressed as a steady per-year rate, so a 3-year and a 10-year fund can be compared fairly.
Volatility (std dev): How bumpy the ride is. A higher number means bigger swings up and down — not necessarily worse, but harder to stomach.
Max drawdown: The worst peak-to-bottom drop the fund has had — “if I'd bought at the worst time, how far down did it go before recovering?”
Sharpe ratio: Return earned for each unit of bumpiness — a simple “bang for your risk.” Higher is better; above 1 is good.

Versus a benchmark

Correlation: How closely two funds move together, from −1 (opposite) to +1 (identical). Two S&P 500 funds are ~1.0; a bond fund vs stocks is much lower — which is what makes it a diversifier.
Excess return (xRoR): How much more (or less) a fund returned than its benchmark, per year.
Tracking error (TE): How much a fund wanders from its benchmark. Index funds want this tiny; active funds accept more of it to try to outperform.
Information ratio (IR): Excess return divided by tracking error — reward for each unit of “wandering.” It's how pros judge whether an active manager's bets are paying off.

This site's tools

Outlook: Our transparent, forward-leaning rating (Strong → Weak) based mostly on fees, consistency, age and size within a fund's peer group. It is not advice and not a third-party agency rating.
Category rank: Where a fund places among its peers over the period, 1–100 (1 = best).
Style box: A 3×3 grid showing whether a stock fund leans large/mid/small company and value/blend/growth — a quick read of what it actually owns.
Portfolio X-Ray: Looks through all your funds to the underlying companies, so you can see hidden overlap (e.g. you own Apple three times) and your true mix.
Cheaper twin: A near-identical fund that costs less — one click to see if you're overpaying for the same thing.

Models

Model: A managed portfolio built in steps — a policy, sleeves of funds, sleeve weights — and published as dated versions that client accounts follow.
Sleeve: One building block of a model (US large cap, bonds, an in-house strategy) with its own benchmark and its own blend of funds.
Net of fee: After the firm's advisory fee. A 1% annual fee billed quarterly takes 0.25% of the account in each billing month; every model number is shown after it.
IR/TE: Information ratio divided by tracking error (in percent). It favors outperformance that comes with little deviation from the benchmark.
t3xR, t12xR: Rolling excess: the fund's growth over the last 3 (or 12) months minus the benchmark's.
Consistency: The share of periods in which a fund beat its benchmark: each third of the main window plus each longer check window.
Score formula: How Screen ranks a sleeve's candidates: a weighted mix of measures, each turned into a percentile rank among the funds that qualify. New models rank on IR/TE alone; ready-made alternatives add low overlap with the funds held, consistency, stress and more, or build your own in Policy.
Rolling 3-year IR: The information ratio of every 3-year stretch ending in each month of the last N years; the score uses the median, which rewards an edge that kept showing up rather than one good run.
Candidate list: A pasted list of tickers — a saved list of funds you follow — that Screen ranks instead of whole categories. Set it for the model in Policy or for one sleeve in its settings.
Fit (R²): How closely a fund moves with the sleeve's benchmark, 0 to 1. A fund that does not resemble the benchmark is shown but not ranked against it.
Expected IR: The information ratio over the longest of the last 10, 7, 5 or 3 years the fund fully covers, shrunk toward zero for a short record: IR × years ÷ (years + 3).
Walk-forward test: Re-running the screen at past dates with only the data available then, and checking what the picks did next — how much of a screen's promised edge survives. Funds that have since closed are not in the data, so the test is, if anything, flattering.
Stand-in: When a fund did not exist during a stress episode, a stand-in's return after the fee is used for those months — the sleeve's benchmark, or the sleeve type's fallback fund, or the model benchmark, the first that reaches back — and the replay says so.
Switching hurdle: The tax on a sale divided by the sale and the account's payback period (3 years by default): the extra return a year the switch must earn to pay for itself in that time.
Wash sale: Buying back the same (or a substantially identical) fund within 30 days before or after selling it at a loss, which disallows the loss for tax.

All analytics here are hypothetical and for information only — not investment advice.