If we want to understand how our investments are doing, most of the time the balance change doesn't tell us the full story. We can have a net balance increase that simply reflects a money transfer into the account and not the true performance of your holdings. In order to fix this, we need a metric that can exclude the effects of account deposits and withdrawals.

This is where Copilot's Estimated Returns comes in. To calculate it, we look at how your holdings change over time and ignore money transfers. It resembles a Time-weighted rate of return (TWR). The time-weighted rate of return refers to the compound growth rate of a portfolio. It breaks up a portfolio’s returns into separate intervals (known as sub-periods) based on incoming and outgoing cash flows. This measurement has become the industry standard for calculating portfolio returns because it eliminates the effect of cash-flow changes.

NOTE: If you see a * next to this metric, it means we don't have the Estimated Return for all the accounts you have included in the Investments tab.