I occasionally describe the formulas we use as a series of bifurcations, starting with time- and money-weighting. And, sometimes I begin with a graphical representation. Well, this morning, I decided to take that graphic to its nth degree, and solicited input from my colleagues, John Simpson and Jed Schneider.

This journey began with the following:

And after a few iterations, it now appears as:

Is it done? No, probably not, but it will be soon. It’s a series of bifurcations (and one or two trifurcations (is that a word?) tossed in), which summarizes the world of rates of return. I think it’s kind of cool … how about you?