How to Measure Portfolio Performance

Performance measurement starts with your cash flows — every deposit into and withdrawal from your investment account, with exact dates. Dividends and capital gains that stay inside the account do not count as external cash flows; only transfers between your bank and your brokerage do.

Your brokerage export (CSV or XLSX) is the most reliable source. XIRR Auditor parses exports from Robinhood, Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, and others automatically, extracting deposits and withdrawals with their correct dates.

Your portfolio's current market value is the final positive cash flow in the XIRR calculation — the amount you would receive if you liquidated everything today. This includes all open positions at their current prices, plus any uninvested cash in the account.

XIRR Auditor fetches live prices for all your holdings automatically when you run the audit.

With your dated cash flows and current value, XIRR gives you the single annualized rate that explains everything. This is your money-weighted return — your actual result, accounting for the timing of every deposit and withdrawal.

A positive XIRR means your portfolio has grown at that annualized rate accounting for all cash movement. A negative XIRR means the portfolio is worth less in net present value terms than what you put in.

A 10% nominal return in a 7% inflation year is only 2.8% in real purchasing-power terms. No raw return figure is complete without an inflation adjustment.

The Real Return Calculator converts your XIRR to a real rate using the Fisher equation: real rate = (1 + nominal) / (1 + inflation) − 1. This tells you how much your actual purchasing power grew, which is ultimately what investing is for.

Use the Benchmark Return tool to see what SPY — or your preferred index — returned over the exact same date range as your portfolio. A fair comparison starts on the date of your first deposit and ends today.

The gap between your XIRR and the period-matched benchmark return is your alpha: positive if you outperformed, negative if the index beat you. This single number tells you whether your stock selection, timing decisions, and fund choices added or subtracted value compared to simply holding an index.