You’ve created a Navexa account. You’ve uploaded your portfolio. You’ve logged into your account and gone… ‘huh’?

One of the most common questions we hear from new members of the Navexa community is:

‘Why does my portfolio performance look different from my trading account? Is it wrong?’

Both good questions.

The short answer to the second one is simple: No, your portfolio performance isn’t wrong (provided all your trades have been added correctly).

Why?

Because of the answer the first question.

How We Measure Your Portfolio’s True Performance

Your performance likely looks different in your Navexa account.

That’s because — rather than being ‘wrong’ about your returns — we factor in everything that impacts your total portfolio performance.

Specifically, we take five factors into account:

Capital Gains: This is the number you might be accustomed to seeing in your trading account. It’s the value by which a holding or portfolio has appreciated in terms of capital growth (i.e. stock price). This is not the same as total performance.

Dividend Return: This shows you how much of your total return comes from dividend income. In your trading account you may not see this vital component of total performance factored into your returns.

Currency Gain: Own stocks outside your home market? Then currency exchange rates are going to have an impact on your investment performance. One of our team owns some US shares through a local trading account similar to STAKE. His trading account shows only capital gains — without currency gain factored in. When they check their portfolio in Navexa, the picture is very different — because it’s the total picture.

Trading Fees: While there’s no metric displayed in your portfolio page, your total return figure is net of trading fees. Trading accounts often leave this out. But if you’ve made 50 trades at $20 per transaction, that’s $2,000 for a single buy and sell across all of them.

Time (Annualization): When you load up your portfolio in Navexa for the first time, all the numbers you see are annualized. This means they take into account how long you’ve had each investment for. You can switch this off in your portfolio settings if you choose, though we don’t advise it (since time is arguably the most valuable currency of all, and a 100% gain in six months is vastly different from a 100% gain in six years).

So…

Your Portfolio Performance Isn’t ‘Wrong’. It’s Complete.

These factors are the reason you might find a significant difference from what you’re used to seeing in your trading account.

If you’d like to know more about how Navexa calculates true portfolio performance, check out our explainer on the industry standard calculation at the heart of the platform.