XIRR

XIRR is the spreadsheet function that computes a money-weighted return from a list of dated amounts. You give it every deposit as a negative number, every withdrawal as a positive one, today's portfolio value as a final positive entry, and the date of each. It returns the annual rate that makes all of those balance, which is the internal rate of return of your own account.

Why it matters

It is the practical way to work out a personal return without a tracker, and it is honest about the thing simple percentage formulas ignore: money that arrived last month has not been invested for a year. Two traps come with it. The result is only as complete as the list of cash flows, so a forgotten transfer or a dividend paid into a separate account skews it, and the figure it produces cannot be compared with an index return, because an index has no cash flows. That comparison needs the time-weighted number instead.

How BullBenchmark shows it

We compute the money-weighted figure from the full transaction history you upload, so no list has to be maintained by hand and no deposit gets forgotten between spreadsheets. The same history also produces the time-weighted number and the replayed index line, which is the comparison a spreadsheet cannot easily make. All three are on one page in the live demo.

Related terms

Money-weighted return (MWR) · Time-weighted return (TWR) · Annualized return

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