The PokéViews Portfolio Lab gives you two tools for exploring Pokémon TCG investment strategies using real historical price data. The Optimizer automatically finds the highest-returning portfolio for a given budget and time period. The Portfolio Builder lets you construct your own portfolio of cards, sealed products, and graded cards to see how it would have performed over time.

The Optimizer uses a mathematical solver to find the provably optimal combination of Pokémon cards, sealed products, and graded cards for a given budget, time period, and set of constraints. Set your budget, buy and sell dates, the number of cards, and optional filters like minimum liquidity or maximum concentration per card. The Optimizer searches across thousands of products and returns the portfolio that would have produced the highest return over that period.

Backtesting lets you test collecting and investment strategies before committing real money. You can evaluate whether sealed products outperformed singles over a given period, see how a concentrated portfolio of chase cards compared to a diversified mix, and measure whether your picks could have beaten the broader market. It turns hindsight into a tool for making more informed decisions going forward.

The Portfolio Builder uses historical PriceCharting market price data to simulate portfolio performance. The methodology is as follows:

Start Date: You choose a month when you would have hypothetically purchased your holdings. Prices are set using the actual market prices from that date.

Holdings: You can add up to 50 unique items — raw cards, graded cards (PSA 10), or sealed products — each with a custom quantity.

Valuation: Your portfolio is valued monthly from the start date to the present using historical price data for each holding.

Benchmark Comparison: You can optionally compare your portfolio's performance against one of four PokéViews market indices (Sealed, Graded, PV100, PV250).

Returns: Total return, annualized return, and benchmark-relative performance are calculated from the simulated valuations.

All prices are sourced from PriceCharting market price data, updated daily. The Portfolio Lab uses the same historical price series that powers all PokéViews indices and charts. For raw cards, the ungraded market price is used. For graded cards, the PSA 10 price is used. For sealed products, the sealed market price is used. Prices are denominated in USD.

Four benchmarks are available for comparison. The Sealed Index tracks the performance of sealed Pokémon TCG products. The Graded Index tracks PSA 10 graded card prices. The PV100 and PV250 track the top 100 and top 250 most valuable English Pokémon cards respectively. PV100 and PV250 require a start date of April 2024 or later, as that is when those indices began. You can also select no benchmark to view your portfolio in isolation.