Robinhood Returns: How to Get Your Real XIRR

Robinhood uses a time-weighted methodology that strips out the effect of your deposit timing. This is designed to show how the investments themselves performed, independent of when you chose to add money.

The problem: you care about the opposite. Your actual financial outcome depends entirely on when you deployed capital. A large deposit right before a pullback hurts your real return in a way that Robinhood's number doesn't reflect. A large deposit before a rally inflates your displayed percentage — making you think you're a better investor than you are.

Suppose you opened your account in 2019 and deposited $1,000. By 2021, you had grown it to $1,800 — great. Then you deposited $50,000 in early 2022 right before the tech correction. Your Robinhood dashboard might show a blended return that looks reasonable, but your actual XIRR — accounting for when that large deposit arrived — could be significantly negative.

Most active users experienced this dynamic between 2021 and 2023, and Robinhood's return figure obscured it.

Robinhood lets you download a complete transaction history as a CSV. This includes every buy, sell, dividend, and — critically — every deposit and withdrawal with exact dates.

With this file, XIRR Auditor computes your money-weighted return: the rate that accounts for when each dollar entered your account and how long it had to compound. This is the number that reflects your actual financial outcome, not a smoothed average.

Once you have your XIRR, compare it to the period-matched return for SPY over the same dates as your first deposit. If you started investing in 2019, don't compare against SPY's 10-year average — compare against what SPY actually returned starting from your first deposit date.

This comparison is the only honest answer to whether your stock picks, trading decisions, and timing have added value over simply buying an index fund.