Edutainment for Investors: A Journey for the Curious – Now Built into the Prompt Builder

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Five minutes. Six chapters. One quietly radical idea: that private investors deserve to know why a recommendation looks the way it does – not just receive it.

I've just shipped the biggest addition to the Portfolio Prompt Builder since launch.

A new interactive journey lives on the quick-start screen, one tap away from the moment you open the app. It's called A Journey for the Curious Investor, and it's my answer to a question I heard again and again in beta feedback:

"Okay, but why do you keep telling me to buy a broad global ETF instead of the stocks I actually like?"

Fair question. Here's the answer, in scrollable form.

What's in it

The journey unfolds as six short chapters. Each one takes a piece of textbook finance and turns it into something you can drag, toggle, or play with.

1. Strategic Asset Allocation. Move the sliders between stocks, bonds, and cash. Watch the donut chart – and the expected return – respond in real time. The takeaway from Brinson, Hood and Beebower is baked in: your asset mix explains around 90% of the variability of your returns. Stock picking is the rounding error.

2. Why ETFs, not individual stocks. A grid of 500 dots lights up to show what owning the whole market actually looks like. Toggle 10 / 20 / 30 years of fees on the cost-erosion chart and see why a one-percent expense ratio is anything but a small number. Plus a quick look at inflation and home bias – two forces that quietly eat returns.

3. The stock-picking trap. SPIVA data, distilled: over 20 years, roughly 90% of active US equity funds underperform their benchmark. Then I let you play. Pick ten stocks out of a universe of well-known tickers, and find out how your basket stacked up against the MSCI World. Most people are surprised. Some are humbled. One or two get lucky.

4. Market timing is a trap, too. The "missing the best days" chart with 0 / 10 / 20 / 30-day toggles shows the cost of bailing out at the wrong moment. Three historical drawdowns – 2000–02, 2008, 2020 – remind you what staying invested actually feels like. Peter Lynch has the closing line: "Far more money has been lost preparing for corrections than in the corrections themselves."

5. Compounding, made tangible. Four sliders – starting amount, monthly contribution, time horizon, expected rate – feed a stacked area chart that cleanly separates what you put in from what the market added. Export the result as a PNG or copy a plain-text summary. Stick it on the fridge.

6. Your profile. A 30-second, three-question quiz (horizon, reaction to a −30% drawdown, need for income) sorts you into one of five profiles, from Capital Preservation to Aggressive Growth. One tap takes you back into the Prompt Builder with your answers pre-filled. No re-entering. No guesswork.

Why I built it this way

Because private investors aren't stupid. They're under-served. The industry's instinct is to either over-explain in banking jargon or under-explain and hand over a PDF that reads like a regulatory filing. I wanted something in between – honest, evidence-led, and genuinely fun to scroll through.

A few design notes for the curious:

  • Editorial voice, not advisor voice. Short sentences. A dry joke where a dry joke fits. Sources listed at the end (SPIVA, Morningstar, JPM Guide to the Markets, Dimson-Marsh-Staunton, Brinson, Bessembinder) so you can check my homework.
  • Single-file, no build, no tracking beyond a privacy-respecting analytics stub. The whole thing is two HTML files – one English, one German – that load fast on anything.
  • Accessibility baseline. Reduced-motion preferences are respected. Every chart has a visible caption. Focus rings on all interactive elements.
  • Bilingual from day one. The journey ships in English and German, with locale-specific formatting (de-DE numbers, German profile labels, „German quotes"). No half-measures.

Try it

It's on the quick-start screen of the Prompt Builder right now. If you'd rather go straight there:

Five minutes. Six chapters. Fewer panic sells, I hope.

Educational content. Not investment advice, not a recommendation, and not an offer to buy or sell financial instruments in the sense of MiFID II (EU) or FIDLEG (CH). All figures are illustrative. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.

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