Read your figures

This page holds the conventions the app's figures rest on — one rule per figure, each at a stable address. Beside every figure in the application there is an information icon; it opens a short text and a link back to the section here that carries the whole rule.

Nothing below describes a screen. These are the rules that decide what your numbers are.

The cost of what you own

Your cost is matched by weighted average cost — the figure your broker calls the PRU.

A position is one stock of two things: a quantity, and the money that quantity cost you. Every purchase adds to both, and the unit cost is simply the money divided by the quantity. A sale subtracts a proportional slice of both. Nothing ever decides which shares left, because under this convention the question has no meaning.

Acquisition fees are absorbed into the cost. A purchase costs you the price of the shares plus the broker's fee, so that is what the position records. Disposal fees are taken out of the proceeds on the way back. Neither is a separate line you have to add up yourself.

There is no FIFO, and no setting to choose one. Weighted average is the French tax rule (CGI art. 150-0 D) for the accounts this app is written for, and carrying two conventions at once would give every figure downstream — your latent gain, your realized gain, both returns — two possible values, with nothing on the page able to say which one you are looking at. There is one convention, and it is the one your tax return uses.

One consequence is worth stating, because it looks like a special case and is not: a position you have sold out entirely reports zero invested by construction — quantity zero, cost zero. There is no closed flag anywhere in the app. "Closed" and "flat for now" differ only by an event that has not happened yet, so nothing separates them that the app could compute.

Your total gain, and its four terms

Your total gain is the sum of four terms, and that sum is its definition — the app adds the four up rather than computing the total separately and trusting that they agree.

total gain  =  latent gain  +  realized gain  +  dividends received
                            −  fees taken from your transfers

Each term is a section of this page. Three of them belong to your positions; the fourth belongs to none of them, which is exactly why it had to be named.

The total counts everything, including what you no longer hold. A position you have sold out still contributed a realized gain and dividends, and dropping it would make the total quietly disagree with your account balance. It stays in the sum; only the table it lives in folds it away.

That is also why two totals in the app can legitimately differ. A figure sitting above a table of positions states the sum of those positions — and the fourth term below belongs to no position, so it cannot appear there. A portfolio-level total carries all four. The gap between them is precisely the fees taken from your transfers, and it is zero for anyone whose broker moves money for free.

A total for one account is the same four terms, about that account. Its positions, closed ones included, and the fees taken from its transfers — never another account's. So the four terms of your accounts add up to the four terms of your portfolio, and each account's total is the sum of its own.

Latent gain

What your positions are worth today, minus what they cost you.

It covers the shares you still hold, and only those: the market value of the quantity you own, less the cost of that same quantity (weighted average). It moves with every price, in both directions.

It is not money you have. It becomes money only when you sell, at which point it stops being latent and becomes realized — the two never count the same shares at the same time.

A position whose price the app could never fetch is carried at its cost, and its latent gain is then exactly zero rather than a loss.

Realized gain

What a sale returned above the cost it consumed.

Selling consumes a slice of the position's cost basis, in proportion to the quantity sold. The realized gain is the proceeds — net of the disposal fee — less that slice. It is settled once, on the day of the sale, and never moves again.

It is not a term you add to what you own. The money from the sale is already sitting in your cash balance; counting the gain again on top of it would count the same euros twice. It appears in your total gain as a breakdown of that total, never as something stacked onto it. This is the rule that reads wrong the first time — a sale that went well does not make your portfolio larger than the cash it produced — and it is the one this app is most careful about.

Realized gain is not a figure that only sold-out positions carry: sell half a position and it starts carrying one while you still hold the rest.

Dividends received

What was paid to you, kept apart from everything else.

A dividend does not lower the cost of your position and does not inflate its latent gain. It is its own term of the total, and the cash it brought is in your account balance. Keeping it separate is deliberate: folded into a single composite figure, income and price movement become indistinguishable, and a year of good dividends reads exactly like a year of price recovery.

This term is never negative. A dividend you received cannot be taken back by a price.

Fees taken from your transfers

Money your broker took out of a deposit or a withdrawal — the fourth term, and the one that belongs to no position.

It is not an acquisition cost (those are absorbed into the cost of your shares), not a disposal cost (absorbed into the proceeds of a sale), not a dividend, and it is attached to no security. There is no position that could carry it, which is why it has to be a term of its own: without it, your total gain and the sum of the three position terms disagree by the amount of those fees, and nothing on the page would say why.

It is shown only when it is not zero. If your broker moves your money for free, this term never appears and you never have to know it exists.

Absorbing the fee into your net contributions instead was the alternative, and it was refused: that would make the money disappear from the product entirely. It left your pocket, so it is counted.

What you have paid in

Net contributed: your deposits less your withdrawals, fees excluded.

It is the only figure on the page that owes nothing to a market. Prices move it by nothing; it changes when, and only when, you move money in or out. That is what makes it the silent denominator of both returns — time-weighted and money-weighted alike are asking what did this become, given what went in — and it is why an account with no deposit recorded has no money-weighted return at all rather than a return of zero.

Fees are excluded, and that is the whole reason your total gain has a fourth term. A fee taken out of a transfer leaves your cash without lowering what this figure records, so the money is gone from one side of the subtraction and not the other. The gap has to land somewhere, and it lands in fees taken from your transfers — a term of its own rather than a silent adjustment here.

Total performance

Total performance: this account's whole gain divided by what you have paid into it.

It is what a euro left in the account since the beginning has become, and it is a cumulative ratio rather than a rate. Three things follow from that, and each is a question it does not answer.

It covers the account's entire life and no shorter period. That is why it carries no range beside it: there is no window to choose, so there is nothing for a control to say and nothing for a legend to state. A time-weighted return without its period is a figure you cannot read; this one has only one period it could ever mean.

It is not annualised. Two accounts showing the same total performance may have taken two years and twenty to get there, so it ranks nothing across accounts of different ages — that is the money-weighted return's job, and it is the figure directly under this one for that reason.

And it says nothing about when the money went in. Every euro counts the same whether it arrived before a rise or after it. Paying more in lowers the ratio until that money earns something, which is exactly what makes it legible: it is a gain read against its own base, not a measure of the holdings on their own.

Time-weighted return

Time-weighted return: how the positions themselves performed, independent of your deposits.

It is an index on base 100 over the period shown: 100 at the start, and what a single unit of money left alone would have become by the end. Paying more money in — or taking it out — moves the index by nothing at all. That is the whole point of it: it measures what you hold, not when you happened to have cash.

It depends on the window, and a ranking can reverse inside it. Two accounts compared over one week and over two years can trade places, with every figure along the way correct. A time-weighted return therefore never travels without the period it covers, and comparing two of them means rebasing both to 100 at the start of the same visible window — otherwise you are comparing a figure counted from 2019 with one counted from 2024, which is two numbers sharing a unit rather than a comparison. For the same reason a comparison never runs further back than the youngest of the things being compared.

While history is being rebuilt, the base date moves and the index is re-based every cycle. The series starts at the earliest day on which everything you held has a price, and that day walks backwards as the rebuild advances — so this percentage, alone among the figures on the page, can change without a price having changed. The base date is shown beside it for exactly as long as it is still moving. See the base of the time-weighted return.

Returns are computed from the dates of your events. Nothing else dates them: no event, no date, no return.

Money-weighted return

Money-weighted return: what your deposits actually earned.

It is the single annual rate that reconciles everything that entered and left — each deposit and each withdrawal on its own date — with what the account is worth today. Unlike the time-weighted return, it counts when you paid in: money added before a rise weighs more than money added after it.

It needs at least one movement of money in or out to mean anything. With nothing ever paid in there is no schedule to solve, and the app leaves the figure absent rather than inventing one.

Returns are computed from the dates of your events. The sentence is the same one as under the time-weighted return, deliberately: both rates are read off the dates you recorded, and the two are far more often misread together than apart.

A position with no price

A position whose price the app could never obtain is valued at its own cost — not at the price of your last transaction, and not at zero.

The rule is keyed to the absence of a price and never to a calendar. A market calendar would explain a hole without filling it, and the app follows listings whose exchange it does not always know.

Valuing at cost rather than at the last traded price is a choice, and it is the one that keeps the convention statable in a sentence: a purchase day comes out exactly neutral, and the latent gain is identically zero for as long as the rule applies. A gain of zero is a truthful statement here; a loss would not be.

It is a convention, never a silent fallback. It applies only where the app has finished looking — no price, and no price coming. While history is still being rebuilt behind a symbol, nothing is carried at cost: the figure says it is waiting instead (see below). Confusing the two would turn "not yet" into "never", permanently.

"No price" means no quote at all. A security the app has quoted but cannot convert into your base currency — because you have not chosen one yet, or because that currency pair does not resolve — is not in this case. It has a price; what it is missing is a rate. Those lines show their native price and say they are waiting for a rate, and the value comes back on its own once the rate does.

One case looks like that one and is not: a security the market answers prices for without ever saying which currency they are in. There is no pair to fetch a rate for, so nothing is on its way — a number with no unit is not a price — and the app carries such a line at its cost like any other it cannot value. It is rare, and it is the one shape where a line quoted every day is still valued at what you paid for it.

On screen that line reads exactly like the first row of the table below: an em dash where its price would be, its cost as its value, and a latent gain of zero. The dash is a statement rather than a gap — the app has a number and cannot say what it is a number of, and printing it under your base currency's symbol would claim the one thing nothing said. The curves, the account comparison and your total gain read that same value, so no screen disagrees with another about what the line is worth.

A position valued this way carries no badge of its own. The em dash where its price would be is already the whole signal, and after a rebuild the case is common enough that a marker on every such line would be noise across the page rather than information.

Where the rule visibly parts company with a market valuation. Carrying at cost values the whole position at one price, and a position built from a purchase and a free grant did not cost one price. Buy ten shares at 100 and receive ten more by dilution, both in the days before the app has any quote for that security, and you hold twenty shares that cost 1 000 — so they are carried at 50 each, half of what the ten you paid for were worth. It takes both events inside the window with no price, which is a handful of days at the start of a line's life; from the first quote onwards the market answers and the question disappears. And the figure is still the honest one: the app knows exactly what the position cost you and does not know what it is worth.

When a figure is absent

One rule covers every empty cell in the app:

The em dash means there is nothing to compute. Anything that is merely missing is named instead.

An em dash is never used for something the app could have fetched and failed to fetch. That distinction is what makes an empty cell actionable: one of these states is repairable by you, and it says so.

What is going on	Price	Value	Latent gain
No price observed, carried at cost	—	its cost	0.00
Price known, conversion rate missing	its native price	waiting for a rate	waiting for a rate
Nothing to compute — position sold out	—	0.00	—
Asked N times, never answered	no price	no price	no price

The last two look alike and are not. A position you sold has no question to ask: its latent gain has no subject. A line entered under a ticker the market does not know has a question that is both legitimate and repairable — usually a typo — and treating it as "nothing to compute" would condemn it to silence forever.

That last case reports its count, never a verdict. The app knows that N consecutive attempts returned nothing; it does not know that nothing will ever come. "Asked seventeen times, no price" is a fact you can act on. "Never" would be a guess.

Zero is not absence. A figure that genuinely equals zero is written 0.00, in the colour of ordinary text — never greyed like something that is missing. On a sold-out position the two sit side by side, and they mean different things.

Where these figures come from

• Your events are the only input: Import your events.
• Prices, and their conversion into your base currency: How prices are collected.
• The history behind your first purchase, and how far back it stays precise: Rebuild and resolution.
• The base currency every figure above is reported in: Settings.