This is a simulate simulation of a buy-and-hold portfolio that tracks the S&P500 and spends a fixed (real) percentage of the original investment amount every year.
The current version of the code isn't taking dividends into account, so as it is now, it's going to produce pessimistic results.
The code here isn't clean. It was whipped up quickly, and the results were used as a conversation topic in a forum.
Hopefully I'll get time to fix the dividends problem and make it cleaner, and/or there will be pull requests for the same.
First, setup the virtualenv: ./create_virtualenv
Then, source the virtualenv: source ./source_virtualenv
To do a basic run: ./investment.py --spending_percentage 3 sim-buy-and-hold --num_years 30
To get more detailed output on what happened each year, add -v in front: ./investment.py -v --spending_percentage 3 sim-buy-and-hold --num_years 30
If you want it to dump out data into csv files, use the --output_csv_prefix option: ./investment.py --spending_percentage 3 sim-buy-and-hold --num_years 30 --output_csv_file /tmp/output
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