Glossary

Ghost portfolio

The ghost portfolio is the outcome of a cash-flow replay expressed as a portfolio in its own right: an investor who received your exact deposits on your exact dates and put every one of them into an index tracker. It has your schedule and none of your opinions. Its value on any given day is what your money would have been worth with the selection removed.

Why it matters

It answers the question most people are actually asking when they ask whether they are beating the market. Not whether the index went up, but whether their own decisions added anything to the money they put in. Because the ghost was given your timing, it cannot be dismissed as an unfair comparison after a bad year, and it cannot be flattered by a lucky deposit either. The distance between the two lines is the part of your result that came from you.

How BullBenchmark shows it

We draw the ghost line beside your own on the same chart, and the verdict on the dashboard is the difference between them. Time travel moves both lines to a chosen day in the past, so you can see whether the gap has been widening, narrowing or simply moving around. The two lines and the verdict are on the demo dashboard before you upload anything of your own.

Related terms

Cash-flow replay · Benchmark · Contribution to return

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