Your Portfolio Tracker Is Answering a Question You Never Asked

TL;DR: I wanted to know whether my portfolio was growing because of my investing decisions, my contributions, or simply the market. I discovered that most portfolio trackers cannot answer that cleanly — and the problem gets worse when your broker, residence, and ETFs sit in different countries. This is what I learned while trying to untangle it, and why I ended up building my own tracker.

The number sat on my broker's home screen, green and precise to two decimals: roughly eighteen thousand dollars earned from investing across the whole period I had been at it.

I looked at it for a long time and realized I did not know what it actually included.

Did it count dividends — the reinvested ones, or only the ones that arrived as cash? Was that before or after tax withheld in a country I do not live in? Did it include positions I...

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