About Quantext’s various portfolio planners:
Quantext’s portfolio planning tools provide:
1) The ability to see whether your basic financial plans are reasonable.
2) The ability to determine whether you have a well-diversified portfolio.
3) The ability to consider changes in a portfolio in order to get the best risk/return balance for your specific needs.
We believe that Quantext’s portfolio planning tools are the very best portfolio planning and asset allocation tools available--and we have performed numerous analyses and tests to demonstrate that this is the case. We have a series of these studies available for your review on the Quantext website under the menu item “Articles”.
NOTE: Quantext is not a registered investment advisor. No information on this website should be taken as advice to buy or sell any asset. Any and all information obtained from Quantext is on an "AS IS" basis.
QPP, QPP40 and QRP use the same basic underlying analytics; they all perform forward-looking Monte Carlo analysis. There are some differences between the planners, however.
QRP was Quantext’s original version of the software and, thus, was given the name Quantext Retirement Planner –though all of the versions, QPP, QPP40 and QRP, have the same retirement planning features. (It’s hard to change the name once so many articles have been written!)
The differences between QPP(20 or 40) and QRP:
The main difference is that QRP allows the user to run analysis using: 1) pure historical data, 2) automatically-generated parameters, or 3) customized parameter sets. This means that you could run a portfolio with the basic parameters and then adjust any of the following parameters by hand: Beta, standard deviation, and alpha for the individual stocks or funds. QPP allows the user to adjust many parameters, but it is not as flexible in terms of user adjustments to parameters. Both QPP and QRP allow adjustment with respect to view on future market returns and annual standard deviation, as well as individual stock and fund total returns.
The other main difference is the number of tickers that can be used. QPP accepts 20. QPP40 accepts 40. QRP accepts 20 but can handle up to 380 via an indirect method of creating sub-portfolios and then meshing them together. This process is rather time consuming.
(Please see the Table of Features below for comparison of adjustable parameters.)
If you want to be able to adjust every parameter and see the impacts, QRP is the right product. However, QRP does require comfort with statistics, as discussed in more detail below.
QPP is the version of choice for most investors and advisors, limiting the adjustable parameters to those that most advisors or investors might have interest in varying. For the vast majority of his research and his articles, Geoff uses QPP.
QPP40 is an enlarged version of QPP that can handle up to 40 individual positions (more details below).
Which version should I license?
Based on the experience of our users, we suggest QPP for users who do not have more than 20 holdings in their portfolios.
QPP40 is for those users with larger numbers of positions. QPP40 is about 4x slower than QPP, however, it is only slower when the user sends the program to the web to retrieve different data. (You need to do this only when you are using different tickers, or if you are using a different historical period for calculations.) For all other manipulations, they are equally fast. A license of QPP40 includes a copy of QPP(20) so that the user can study smaller portfolios (or a portion of a larger portfolio) with the faster QPP(20).
QRP is for those users who want additional flexibility to hand-adjust parameters like the volatilities and Betas of individual positions. QRP is larger and slower than QPP. QRP would only be a good choice for users who are comfortable with statistics as the users can potentially input parameter sets that are not internally compatible. (QRP gives you a warning if this should happen, but the user will need to be able to understand the meaning of this and right the situation.) If you want to use largely automated parameter sets for risk/Beta/ etc., QPP is the better choice. We consider QRP to be more of a research tool.
Finally, we would like to note that multiple users have not been able to get QRP to work with Excel 2007. On all versions of Excel between (but not including) 2000 and 2007, it runs well.
Table of Features
|
|
QPP |
QPP40 |
QRP |
|
Accepted Number of Tickers |
20 |
40 |
20, but can accept up to 380 via indirect method * |
|
Source of Statistical Projection?
|
Quantext Forward Looking Simulator |
Quantext Forward Looking Simulator |
Quantext Forward Looking Simulation OR hand-adjusted parameters OR a combination of these |
|
Retirement Planning Capabilities? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Correlations Table? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Employee Stock Options Capabilities? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Ability to Include Owning Call Options? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Investing and Income Draw are Customizable over Time? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Accounts for Fund Fees? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Loads Can be Input Manually? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Accounts for Splits? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Accounts for Dividend Yield? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Shows Forward-Looking Expected Dividend Yield? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Adjustable View on Expected Market Returns? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Adjustable View on Annual Standard Deviation of Market Returns? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Adjustable Expected Return on Individual Tickers? |
Yes |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Adjustable Beta on Individual Tickers? |
No |
No |
Yes |
|
Adjustable Volatility on
Individual Tickers? |
No |
No |
Yes |
You can include up to 380 tickers using QRP, but you must use an indirect method. A .pdf document with directions for this process is included on the QRP disc, which you receive when you license this product.
