Visualise your portfolio with Claude Design
A beginner-friendly walkthrough. Take a plain list of holdings and turn it into four clear pictures in a few minutes - no spreadsheets and no finance background needed.
Visualise your portfolio like professionals with Claude Design
A beginner-friendly walkthrough. Take a plain list of holdings and turn it into four clear pictures in a few minutes — no spreadsheets, no finance background needed.
Start here
What you will build, and what you need
A list of holdings is easy to read but hard to see. Every line looks the same size, so a 30% position and a 5% position sit on the same row in the same font. In this guide you will use Claude Design to turn that same list into four pictures: the overall shape of the portfolio, the gaps in it, the hidden overlap inside your funds, and a map of where your money sits in the world.
Claude Design turns your holdings into a picture. It does not analyse them, rate them, or tell you what to do. Every view simply makes something visible — what it means for you is your call. Throughout this guide, the tool surfaces; you judge.
Before you start, you will need:
- Access to Claude, with Design. Open a new chat and select the Design option in the sidebar. (Claude’s layout changes now and then — if Design has moved, look for it near the new-chat options.)
- Your list of holdings with a rough percentage for each. Exact figures are not needed — roughly how much sits in each thing is enough to get started.
- About fifteen minutes. Each view takes Claude Design well under a minute to draw; the time is really just you reading what it shows.
Prefer to watch?
I go through the whole thing, all four views, in one short video. Read on below, or watch the full demo on YouTube and follow along.
The example we will use
A sample portfolio
Here is the made-up portfolio used throughout this guide. On paper it looks sensibly spread out — a broad index fund, a few well-known stocks, some bonds, gold, cash and a slice of Europe.
| Asset class | Illustrative holding | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| US equities (broad) | S&P 500 ETF | 30% |
| US mega-cap stocks | Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon (5% each) | 20% |
| Government bonds | US Treasury bond ETF | 10% |
| Commodities | Gold | 10% |
| Cash | Money market / cash | 20% |
| European equities | Europe equity ETF | 10% |
| Total | 100% |
This is an illustrative example built purely to show what Claude Design can do. It is not anyone’s real holdings and it is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything.
Animation 1
1Portfolio overview
Why it’s helpful
There is something about a list that is easy to miss: every holding gets the same amount of space, one line each. A 30% position and a 5% position can look almost identical — even though one has six times more money behind it. Your eye just reads them as two rows. This first view fixes that.
What you see
The same portfolio, nothing added or removed — but now every holding is sized by how much it actually weighs. Straight away the shape looks different. The S&P 500 fund is the biggest single piece at 30%. And the four separate lines for Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and Amazon are grouped into one category: US mega-cap stocks, 20%. Before you have looked at anything else, those two areas already account for half the portfolio.
A holding’s weight is simply how much of your total portfolio sits in it. If you have $100 invested and $30 is in one fund, that fund’s weight is 30%. Sizing each holding by its weight is what turns a flat list into a shape you can actually read.
How to build it
The broad idea:
- Give Claude Design your full list of holdings with a rough percentage each.
- Ask it to turn every holding into a visual sized by its weight, rather than one equal line per holding — labelled by asset class.
- Ask it to group related names into one category where that helps — here, the four US mega-caps become a single “US mega-cap stocks” block.
That one change — from equal lines to proportional sizes — is what makes the shape of a portfolio visible for the first time. Nothing about the holdings changed; only how you are looking at them.