Schwab Portfolio Performance: Your Actual Money-Weighted Return

Schwab displays an annualized return on your portfolio summary page. This is typically calculated using a time-weighted methodology that normalizes for cash flow timing. In plain terms: it treats every sub-period as equal regardless of how much money was at work during each period.

This is useful for benchmarking fund managers. It is misleading for individual investors who have added or withdrawn money at various times, because it doesn't tell you what happened to your actual dollars — only what happened to the investments themselves.

Many Schwab investors dollar-cost average — contributing monthly or quarterly over years. For these investors, the time-weighted return can look dramatically different from the money-weighted return depending on when the contributions happened relative to market movements.

An investor who contributed consistently through 2020–2022 and then watched a correction in 2022 may show a very different Schwab percentage than their true XIRR would reveal — which accounts for the dollars at risk during each specific month.

Schwab allows you to download transaction history as a CSV file. The export includes all account activity: deposits, withdrawals, trades, dividends, and interest payments with exact dates.

XIRR Auditor reads Schwab's CSV format automatically and solves for your true money-weighted return across your entire history — the number that reflects what your money actually earned, not what the markets returned in the abstract.

Your Schwab XIRR, compared against a period-matched index return, gives you the most important number in personal investing: whether your decisions over the years have added or subtracted value. For investors using both self-directed accounts and mutual funds, XIRR across the combined history gives a single honest number.

Many long-term Schwab investors discover that their active decisions underperformed a simple index fund, and use this insight to simplify their portfolio going forward.