Glossary
The stock market has a language of its own. Our glossary helps you make sense of it.
No one knows for certain what the market has in store. By evaluating past financial events—and determining the probability they’ll reoccur in the future—we can gain a lens into potential performance. This number does just that.
Investing in stocks is all about balancing risks against (potential) rewards. A stock’s Sharpe ratio compares possible reward to risk, to help you envision the uncertainty factor. In general, a larger Sharpe ratio indicates better risk-adjusted returns.
This nifty number—pronounced SEE-var—presents a worst-case scenario of the largest loss your portfolio might suffer on any given day, based on a weighted average of the most extreme possible losses.
When a stock fluctuates a lot, it is highly volatile (or risky). That means you can lose or gain a lot of money quickly, which is why it’s typically better to find a strong stock with low volatility—especially when investing long term.
Frequently Asked Questions
Have questions about JAVLIN Invest? Our team has you covered.
You might dream about finding the next Amazon or Apple stock—and holding onto it for decades as you continue to grow your portfolio. But, like many people, you probably don’t spend enough time considering the risks you’ll encounter along the way.
JAVLIN Invest lets you see your portfolio from a new vantage point—one that the pros use, which is based on historical data and industry-accepted formulas. With JAVLIN Invest, you gain powerful education on how to make better, safer, long-term investments—and you’ll do so in a fraction of the time it takes to use a spreadsheet.
Great question! We use Plaid, a platform that connects bank accounts and financial investment apps, to safely collect data from your brokerage accounts. Using a secure API, Plaid carefully stores your data for us, so you don’t have to worry about your financial information or brokerage account passwords being compromised.
We refresh your account’s data every morning. When there’s a change in one of your brokerage accounts, it will show up in JAVLIN Invest the next business day. Note that the information available in JAVLIN Invest depends on the data that your brokerage institution(s) shares with Plaid.
In the JAVLIN Invest app, Project shows how macroeconomic factors can affect your portfolio through four distinct scenarios. Based on our proprietary supervised Machine Learning algorithms, Project can help inform your investment strategy. No algorithm can perfectly predict the market, but forecasting with Project offers a simple way to evaluate your portfolio’s potential performance and illuminate risk.
We use established Monte Carlo simulations, a class of computerized algorithms, to determine optimal stock allocations for your portfolio. Monte Carlo simulations assess risk by presenting a range of possible outcomes, distributed by the likelihood each will occur.
The gray line represents the S&P 500 index, our benchmark for determining how well your portfolio is performing each day.
JAVLIN Invest’s rank feature provides your portfolio a letter grade based on its daily return, volatility, CVaR, and Sharpe ratio (see Glossary for definitions). To calculate these, we compare your portfolio to the S&P 500, an index of 500 large companies based in the U.S. As our benchmark, the S&P 500’s performance always earns a C rank. If your portfolio earns a B or higher, it’s performing better than the S&P 500.
JAVLIN Invest processes a large amount of data. While other investment apps might simply sync information provided by your brokerage accounts, JAVLIN Invest runs complex calculations, including supervised machine learning, Monte Carlo simulations, backtesting, and optimization algorithms. We appreciate your patience as we continually strive to make the app more efficient. With investing, good things come to those who wait.
Optimizing a portfolio for maximum return often leads to high volatility, meaning your investments could plunge before going back up. If you’re risk averse and tend to sell when investments dip, optimizing for maximum return may not be the best approach to you.
Unfortunately, no. In the realm of investing, nothing is guaranteed. Investing in stocks that performed well in the past doesn’t ensure desirable performance in the future. Portfolio optimization simply attempts to reduce risk while maintaining positive returns. It doesn’t promise any particular outcome.
Historical data is used when we are taking a “snapshot” of what your portfolio looks like today, such as the metrics on the home tab. Forecasted data, which includes analyst predictions, is used for forward looking metrics, such as the metrics on the build, allocate, and project tabs.
View your portfolio from a new vantage point
