How to measure trading or investing returns

In order to compare your portfolio to benchmarks like the JSE’s Top40, you need to be able to monitor your actual returns. Simon Brown follows a few simple steps to measure growth in his portfolio.

Simon Brown

one of the things I keep on talking about is measuring our trading and/or investing returns against a relevant benchmark such as the JSE’s Top40 or All Share Index. But how do we measure them? We can’t use our broker’s website as it typically just gives the cost price we paid for a share and if we’ve made a few purchases over the years, it’ll be an average price. Further, the return is that average price since the date of purchase and does not include dividends we may have received over the period. So, in order to know what our actual returns over a period are, we need to do some work and unitise our portfolio. This is simple enough and once we have started the process, keeping the figures up…

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Finweek - English (Digital) - 1 Issue, 02-nov-17

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