Entering Assets in the Real World

Judging from the other posts, you are already working on making the Monte Carlo section of the program more usable. Here are a few of my concerns:

Adding new assets is tricky, considering the statistical information one needs to provide. As the posts and replies show, calculating relative variance is especially troublesome. Most users will be reluctant to venture beyond the standard list of assets. With that in mind....

It would really help if the standard list of assets contained some generic assets such as total stock and total bond funds, as well as global funds covering both US and foreign. I'd rather have you estimating the appropriate statistics than trying to do it myself. And why does cash appear in the default portfolio but not on the asset list?

Since one may have only a vague idea of a future portfolio, such as 50/30/20 stock/bond/cash, there ought to be a quick way of entering such a thing without being forced to choose between more precise categories like short and long bonds. Again I'm sure you could arrive at a reasonable estimate of the stats you need better than I could. Entering ticker symbols for particular mutual funds (a planned improvement) would be fine for one's present portfolio, but less practical for imagining the distant future.

Many investors get far below a market return on their assets because they are invested in high-expense mutual funds or retirement plans. With other software I can easily adjust the return to take expenses into account. With ESPlanner it appears that I would have to create a new asset to use anything but your pre-calculated returns. Do your statistics assume that if the market is up 10%, the investor actually gets 10%? I'm sure you've seen the research showing that fees, expenses, trading costs, and timing errors (tendency of investors to buy hot funds and sell cold ones) result in average individual returns far below market.

How do I just change the % share of an asset without deleting and re-entering the asset? That seems unnecessarily cumbersome. (And how can I change the % allocation to cash if cash isn't on the asset list?)

These are just my first impressions as a one-day user. My perspective may change as I read more posts and spend more time with the program (if I decide to keep it). I appreciate the logic of what you are trying to do, but I'm having a little trouble with the implementation.