A virtual portfolio is a portfolio record with no real money behind it. You track your fund choices, your entry and exit timing, and your allocation using real TEFAS prices; the only difference is that no money left your bank account. Tefaster does not execute fund trades of any kind, it records transactions. That is the only thing separating a virtual portfolio from a real one: there is no actual order behind the record.
Why It Works
When a fund catches your interest you normally have two options: put money in and find out, or never find out. A virtual portfolio opens a third path. It puts your choice in writing, fixes its date, and makes the outcome measurable. Months later, instead of saying that you should have bought that one, you can see what would actually have happened.
The real benefit is not one fund's return but seeing your own decision habits. How many funds you spread across, how often you switch, and what you do during a drawdown all end up on the record. That record shows you the patterns you would rather not repeat with real money.
Setting It Up in Tefaster
Create a new portfolio and give it a name that stands out, such as "Virtual". Use the description field to write down the rules: your starting capital, the length of the run, and how many funds you will use. That note is what lets you hold yourself to the rules later.
A free account is limited to one portfolio. Keeping a virtual portfolio next to your real one requires Premium. If you have no real investments yet, you can use your single portfolio directly as a practice space.
Recording Transactions
A transaction takes only four inputs: the fund, the type (buy or sell), the number of units, and the date. You do not enter a price. Tefaster uses the TEFAS price for that date and computes cost as units times price. This is why a virtual portfolio is as realistic as a real one: the prices are not your estimates, they are the prices that actually occurred that day.
You can also enter a past date. If no price exists in the database for that date, it is fetched from TEFAS in the background. That lets you start your run six months back instead of today.
One constraint is worth knowing upfront: unit counts are whole numbers. You cannot enter an amount in lira; you work out how many units that amount buys and enter the unit count. For funds with a high unit price, this leaves a small gap between the amount you had in mind and the amount you recorded.
The Scoreboard: What Counts as Winning?
The easiest mistake with a practice portfolio is looking at the result and concluding that finishing up is enough. In an environment with high inflation and high deposit rates, a positive return means very little on its own. Tefaster draws the portfolio value chart on your dashboard alongside five reference benchmarks: the reference interest rate (TLREF), BIST-KYD Gold, BIST-KYD Deposit, BIST-KYD Equity Fund, and BIST 100. The score of the game is which of those lines you beat.
A free account shows portfolio return percentage, XIRR, realized return, and volatility. Volatility matters especially here: if two portfolios produce the same return, the one that swung more took more risk. Setting target weights to get rebalancing signals, and drift alert emails, are Premium features.
A Three-Month Challenge
The simpler the rule set, the better it works. One example: fix a starting capital and do not change it during the run. Pick three to five funds, since more than that makes the result hard to read. Write a target weight for each fund and note it in the portfolio description. Check in once a month, because checking daily turns the exercise into a reflex test. At the end, compare yourself against the TLREF and BIST 100 lines.
The market leaderboard and the fund comparison tool make selection easier, but picking the best fund of the last three months is copying the past, not demonstrating selection skill.
Four Ways to Fool Yourself
Editing history. Because you can enter past-dated transactions, deleting a record that went badly and replacing it with a better one is technically possible. Do that once and the portfolio stops being a rehearsal and becomes fiction.
Not counting the emotional cost. Sitting through a twenty percent drawdown is easy when there is no money at stake. Whether you would have sold in a real drawdown is something the rehearsal cannot tell you.
Mixing the two. If your virtual and real portfolios share a naming pattern, it gets hard to tell which numbers are real. Keep it explicit in both the name and the description.
Drawing conclusions from one run. Three months is not enough to separate a good decision from good luck. Applying the same rules across several consecutive runs says far more than any single run's result.
A virtual portfolio is no substitute for real investing. But it is the cheapest way to measure what you actually know about fund selection, allocation, and patience.