roi year to date calculation

etrain

So when I go to my brokers website it says rate of return ytd is 7%. When I look at quicken it says 9.8 percent. Is it calculating what it thinks I will make by the end of the year or is it actually calculating to the current date? To me it seems like it's calculating what it thinks I will make by the end of the year based on the first nine months of this year. windows edition. Then the average annual returned is another one that I don't know how they figure out.

Jim_Harman

Quicken has several similarly-named performance measures, so we must be careful to use the exact names. Unless noted below, I will use the names of the columns in the Investing > Portfolio views

Avg. Annual Return (%) is to me the most useful measure. It uses an Internal Rate of Return (IRR) calculation. This is the same calculation that is used in the Investment Performance Report (IPR) and is equivalent to Excel's XIRR function. It takes into account the gains or losses and the timing and amounts of cash flows into and out of a security or group of securities over the selected date range. It also takes compounding into account.

If you set the date range to less than one year, the annualized percentages shown assume that the performance will continue at the same rate for a full year. This is useful for fixed price securities like money market funds, but not so much for other securities.

However there is a way to see YTD return on the IPR or Portfolio views. If you set the IPR date range to Yearly and Current year, the report shows YTD gains or losses assuming that the security prices are flat and there are no further cash flows for the rest of the year. In the Portfolio views, this is the same as setting the "As of" date to 12/31 of the current year and looking at the "Avg. Annual Return (%) 1-Year" column. There may be some differences between the reported percentages and those shown elsewhere, depending on the timing of any purchases or sales you have made during the period and whether or not you have reinvested any dividends or other distributions.

The data in the Return (%) columns in the Portfolio views is downloaded from Quicken's quote provider and is not affected by the timing or amounts of any purchases or sales. It assumes that any distributions have been reinvested. The data is annualized for periods of more than one year. It only includes publicly traded securities with valid ticker symbols, excludes ETFs for some reason, and is often out of date. Quicken does not store the history for this data; if it is not out of date it is as of the last date quotes were updated.

The ROI (%) columns are based on Quicken's Amount Invested figure. The starting amount is the market value of the selected security(s) and it increases if money is added, but does not go down if there are sales. Thus it will be higher than you would expect if there are partial sales during the period.

I hope this answers your questions.