I agree with Dale that pre-tax gains is pretty much the only game in town. Unfortunately, providing after-tax gains is not necessarily possible or better, since tax consequences will vary a lot per individual.
I am surprised that people even can calculate their percentage gains. I have only one portfolio that had no inflows and outflows for the year. And that's the only one where I would claim a certain percentage gain (~11% this year). Calculating gains for portfolios with inflows and outflows can be IMHO quite misleading. Unless inflows and outflows are really small compared to the whole portfolio, there are tons of things that would influence the calculated returns: you have to adjust for when the inflows and outflows occurred, since you cannot say that the money was held from January if it got into portfolio in December. But if you adjust for the time, then you can get into games that the new money earned outsized gains. You can get better (or worse) numbers by getting the money in when portfolio is down and getting it out when portfolio is up and so on...
All this is very unfortunate, since I would love to calculate my returns, but everything I tried in the portfolios that get money in and out was IMHO very unreliable.
The only other way that I tried to calculate my returns was comparing how my investment did to what I would have gotten by investing into SP500, BRK, TAVFX and LVTMX at exactly the times when inflows and outflows occurred. I do not adjust for dividends though, since it would take too much time and I also do not count commissions to buy them. In any case, after this year BRK is on top, my portfolio is marginally worse (it was better last year, but BRK did >20% this year compared to my ~11%) and the other three comparative investments (SP500, TAVFX and LVTMX) are much lower. This method does not give a percentage gains though. |
