Portfolio Return Calculator

Its headline is the money-weighted return: your true per-dollar gain, which counts the size and timing of every contribution and withdrawal, not just the change in value. For the default portfolio — 100,000 growing to 115,300 over three years with some contributions, a withdrawal, income and fees — the net gain is 13,980, a money-weighted return of about 13.77% in total, or roughly 4.40% a year once annualized. It sits next to the flow-blind simple return so you can see how much your cash flows shifted the picture.

The simple return only looks at where the portfolio started and ended — for the default it is 15,300 on 100,000, or 15.30%. But that ignores the fact that you added and withdrew money along the way, so part of the ending value is just capital you contributed, not growth. The money-weighted return divides the genuine profit by the average capital actually at work, which here is about 101,500. The gap between the two numbers is exactly the footprint your contributions and withdrawals leave on the headline figure.

They answer different questions. The money-weighted return measures your experience as an investor — it rewards or penalizes the timing of your cash flows. The time-weighted return chains each period's return together and strips that timing out, so it measures how the holdings themselves performed, the way a fund quotes its track record. Because they cover different things, this tool computes the money-weighted return from your holdings and the time-weighted return from the optional performance history, and shows each clearly labeled rather than pretending one number does both jobs.

Each holding's contribution is its weight at the start of the period multiplied by its own return. Add them up and you get the portfolio's return, so the table shows precisely which positions drove the result and which dragged on it. In the default portfolio the US-stock sleeve, returning 24% from half the money, contributes 12 percentage points; international adds 2.5 and bonds add 0.8, summing to the 15.3% blended figure. A holding can have a great return yet a small contribution if its weight is tiny.

Because your return is the weighted average of your holdings' returns, the split between them usually matters more than picking the exact winner inside each sleeve. A modest position in a soaring asset moves the needle far less than the same move in your largest holding. The calculator shows your beginning, ending and target weights side by side, the drift between them, and the contribution each weight made — so you can see whether your result came from the allocation you chose or from one lucky position.

Income — dividends, interest, distributions — is part of your return whether you reinvest it or take it as cash, so the calculator adds it to the gain. Enter what each holding generated in the income field. One caution the tool flags: if you took a dividend as cash, record it as income, not as a withdrawal, or you will count the same money twice. If instead the income was reinvested and is already reflected in your ending value, leave the income field blank so it is not double-counted.

More than they look, because a fee is taken from the balance that would otherwise keep compounding. Enter the fees and costs charged on each holding and the calculator subtracts them from your gain, then shows the gain before fees, after fees, and after fees and tax so you can see the erosion in money rather than abstract percentages. Over long horizons a fee that seems trivial as a single year's figure quietly compounds into a meaningful share of the wealth you could have kept.

Drift is how far your current mix has wandered from your target as winners grow and laggards shrink. The calculator reports each holding's drift — its ending weight minus its target — and a single portfolio figure equal to half the sum of those gaps, which is the share of the portfolio that would have to move to get back on plan. In the default portfolio the US-stock holding has drifted above its target while the international holding has fallen well below, leaving a one-way drift of about six percent.

Rebalancing means trading back to your target weights. For each holding the tool computes the trade as your target weight times the ending portfolio value, minus the current value of that holding — a positive number to buy, a negative one to sell. The trades cancel out to zero overall, since you are only reshuffling the same pot rather than adding to it. If your targets do not add up to 100% the tool rescales them first, so the trades always balance.

A return means little without knowing the risk taken to earn it. The Sharpe ratio divides your return above the risk-free rate by your volatility, so a higher number means more reward per unit of risk. The Sortino ratio is similar but counts only downside volatility, on the view that upside swings are not what investors fear. Both are computed from the optional performance history, because volatility cannot be seen from a single start-and-end snapshot — you need the bumps in between.

Maximum drawdown is the deepest drop from a prior high to a later low across your performance history — the worst loss you would have sat through if you bought at the peak and held to the bottom. It captures something an average return hides: the path. Two portfolios can finish with the same return when one climbed steadily and the other lurched through a brutal collapse, and drawdown is what tells them apart. It often matters more than volatility for whether an investor actually stays the course.

The calculator compares like with like: your annualized return against a benchmark annual rate, such as a broad index. It also grows your starting value at each rate over the period so you can see the difference in money as well as in percentage points. Pick a preset — a stock index, a bond index — or type your own. If you also supply a benchmark return history alongside your own, the tool estimates beta and alpha, which describe how much of your result came from market exposure versus genuine outperformance.

Yes. Switch the mode to find the ending value a target return implies, the return needed to reach a target value, the level yearly contribution required to hit a future goal, the return a goal demands given your contributions, or the return one specific holding must deliver for the whole portfolio to reach a target. Each is the same underlying maths rearranged, so a figure you solve in one direction reproduces when you plug it back into the forward analysis.

Contributions are money you paid in; withdrawals are money you took out. Both feed the profit identity — your profit is everything you have plus what you took out and earned, less everything you put in, less fees — and the average-capital figure that the money-weighted return divides by. Adding money mid-period raises the capital at work and, all else equal, lowers the reported per-dollar return; this is correct, not a flaw, and it is exactly why the simple return overstates results for portfolios that were topped up.

A start-and-end snapshot cannot show volatility or the path between, which is why risk metrics rely on the separate history you enter. The money-weighted return uses a mid-period approximation for flow timing rather than exact dates. Benchmark presets are illustrative long-run averages, not live quotes. And every figure is backward-looking — it describes what happened, smooths over the bumps, and is never a forecast. Treated as a clear-eyed measurement rather than a prediction, though, it is one of the most useful ways to judge a portfolio.

Yes. Pick your currency at the top of the inputs and every money figure — values, contributions, gains, rebalancing trades and the copied summary — is formatted in it. The maths is currency-agnostic: returns, weights and ratios are pure ratios, so they read the same whatever currency your holdings are denominated in, as long as you enter every value in that one currency.