Transparency is a feature. This page explains what time-weighted return measures and why we compute it — in plain terms. The precise formulas and numeric conventions are documented in our internal methodology; the summary here is deliberate, not an omission.
Time-weighted return (TWR) measures how the portfolio itself performed, stripped of the distorting effect of money moving in and out. Deposits and withdrawals are decisions the client makes, not the manager — yet a naive return calculation would credit or blame the manager for their timing. TWR removes that noise so the figure reflects the manager's investment decisions alone. It is the standard for comparing managers on a like-for-like basis.
The way it works: the history is cut into sub-periods at every date an external cash flow occurs, a clean return is computed within each sub-period on the money that was actually invested, and those sub-period results are chained together by compounding (geometric linking), not by simple addition. Because each external flow is treated as available for the whole sub-period it lands in, it is counted as part of the invested base rather than as return, which is exactly what keeps the client's timing out of the manager's score.
The defining property is flow-timing invariance: cutting a sub-period at an extra date where no money moved in or out leaves the result unchanged. Nothing about how you slice the calendar changes the answer, only real cash flows do. Read it as a growth figure — positive means the portfolio gained over the horizon, negative means it lost.
