Investment Performance Report

jaxgab

The report only calculates "Avg. Annual Return", which in my opinion has very limited usefulness. When I run a YTD Investment Performance Report, I am interested in seeing my YTD Investment Return, not my YTD Investment Annualized Return. I think most investors want to see their YTD Investment Return so it can be compared against YTD Stock Market Benchmarks.

Perhaps the report can be modified to display both returns (YTD and YTD Annualized).

Quicken's "Growth of $ 10,000" chart is also incorrect according to my own calculations. Quicken displays 11.45% today while I manually calculate 11.93%. Quicken's "Cumul Net Additions" amount is correct but the return displayed by Quicken's chart is noticeably off.

Jim_Harman

Setting the date range in the Investment Performance Report to YTD assumes that the YTD gain or loss will continue at the same rate for the rest of the year. This is realistic for CDs and money market funds with a fixed share price, but often not for other securities.

To see an accurate YTD return in the Investment Performance Report for securities whose prices vary, you can set the Date range to Yearly and Current year. This calculation assumes that the performance will be flat for the rest of the year.

Re: Growth of $10,000, I agree that Quicken's calculations are incorrect, especially if there is a large inflow or outflow of cash near the start of the period. See this discussion

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7939992/investment-performance

I posted an Idea requesting that the Growth of $10,000 calculations be corrected, but it has been closed and archived.

jaxgab

Thanks for the response. I've used Quicken since 1993 and never once ran an Investment Performance Report with the Date range set to "Yearly/Current Year". It is certainly not intuitive.

It is also interesting that Investment Performance Report report result for "Yearly/Current year" doesn't agree with "Growth of $ 10,000" chart. I'm still thinking Quicken could do a lot better. My Investment Performance Report says 11.96% today while the "Growth of $ 10,000" chart says $11.45%.

Jim_Harman

If you read the discussion I linked above, you will see that the IRR or Average Annual Return calculation used by the Investment Performance Report is supposed to be different from the Growth of $10,000's Time Weighted Return or TWR calculation, even when the latter is computed correctly.

The IRR is annualized and includes your cash flows and daily compounding. It produces the same results as Excel's XIRR function.

When computed correctly, the TWR ignores the amounts of your cash flows and considers just the performance of the underlying securities for the time you held them.