I’ve been working on a personal project to make investment planning easier – a tool that simulates and visualizes long-term investments. It started as something I built for myself to understand my own finances better, but I realized it could be helpful for others too.
I’d love your feedback or ideas for improvement. Thanks for taking a look!
Show HN: Investment and Retirement planner using Monte-Carlo Simulations | Dark Hacker News
This’ll sound harsh: Your landing page doesn’t do a great job of telling me why I want to use your tool. How is the simulation done? Do you mean you account for common historic market trends or just added some hysteresis? Is it just a pretty coat of paint on an interest rate tracker?
Is this open source? If I can’t audit the code, and it isn’t from my bank, a program is not getting my financial information.
Put privacy front and center on the homepage. Put why it’s better than google sheets or excel.
Hey, thanks a lot for the feedback! It's not harsh, direct feedback is by far the most useful.
You are right, it is not super clear how the simulation is done, I'll add that to the page. Currently, you enter a volatility rate, and then the simulation randomly draws from a normal distribution according to the volatility. Doing this around 1000 times gives the range of possible scenarios. In the future I'm planning to add simulations based on historical data.
The code is not open source, however you also don't have to connect any banking to it, it can be used as-is. I am taking privacy pretty seriously, that is why there is a legally binding privacy policy on the bottom of the page. But yes, I could put more emphasis on it, and explain how the page is keeping data secure.