What is Time-weighted Return?Time-weighted Return (TWR) is the most commonly-used way to calculate returns in the financial industry, and it's an easy metric to compare returns between different portfolios.
By tracking the portfolio’s performance from your first deposit, a portfolio’s TWR removes the distortions that various cash inflows and outflows create. In essence, TWR measures the portfolio manager’s ability to generate returns, not the effects of an individual’s deposit and withdrawal behaviours.
What is Money-weighted Return?Money-weighted Return (MWR) assigns a weight to each of your deposits and withdrawals. So, a deposit of RM1,000 has a lesser effect on your portfolio’s return figure than a deposit of RM100,000.
This approach helps to gauge the impact and effectiveness of an individual’s timing of deposits and withdrawals. As a result, due to the emphasis of deposits and withdrawals, MWR may naturally overweight or underweight the returns, as well as distort the performance of the portfolio manager and their investment strategy.
MWR can potentially inflate your returns if you deposit when the markets are going up, or similarly understate your performance when you deposit while the markets are going down. It will also assign a larger weight to a lump sum deposit.
MWR’s merit lies in that it clarifies the impact of the individual investor’s investment decisions (e.g., when you deposit and withdraw).
So, unless your portfolio manager determines when to deposit or withdraw funds from your portfolio, MWR doesn’t effectively measure your portfolio manager’s performance. You should only use MWR to compare two different portfolios if you have the exact same deposit and withdrawal behaviors for both portfolios.
https://www.stashaway.my/r/how-stashaway-calculates-returns