True story behind your returns

Time-weighted return (TWR) strips out the effect of when you added or withdrew money — useful when you want to judge your strategy and compare against a benchmark. Money-weighted return (MWR), also called IRR, includes the timing of your cashflows — useful when you want to judge your actual investor return, including whether you got the timing right.

A simple example: if you held an ETF that returned 10% on a $1,000 starting balance but added another $9,000 right before a 5% drawdown, your TWR is still positive (the strategy did fine), but your MWR is roughly negative (you lost money in absolute terms because of the timing). Both are correct; they answer different questions.

Capitally can compute both metrics, for every account, every asset class, and the whole portfolio. Use TWR to compare your strategy against the S&P 500, MSCI World, or any custom benchmark. Use MWR/IRR to see what the portfolio actually did for you, dollar in, dollar out. Switch between them right in the portfolio dashboard. For the full methodology breakdown, see measuring investment performance.

Both rates can also be discounted by a benchmark — that's a separate move from comparing side-by-side. Discount by a CPI series for your real (after-inflation) return; by S&P 500 or MSCI World for your alpha; by a 10Y government bond yield for your premium over a near-risk-free rate. The discount applies uniformly to TWR, IRR, and ROI, so all three move from "nominal" to "real" or "excess" together. See discounting by a benchmark for the mechanics.

Capitally supports six cost-basis methods: FIFO (first-in, first-out), LIFO (last-in, first-out), HICO (highest cost first), LOCO (lowest cost first), Manual specific-lot identification, and Average Cost Basis (ACB) with both Asset and Asset+Account pooling. You can configure the method per project, per account, per asset, or per position — the most specific setting wins. See cost basis methods for full details and worked examples.

Manual specific-lot identification is the basis for tax-loss harvesting: when you sell a partial position, Capitally lets you pick which lots to close, shows the realised gain or loss for each combination, and updates the remaining cost basis accordingly. The choice flows into the country-specific capital-gains report so the tax document reflects the actual lots you closed.

Multi-currency cost basis is preserved at the trade currency, so cross-border investors see both the local-currency realised gain (what the broker reports) and the base-currency realised gain (what their home tax authority cares about). Built-in tax presets for Canada, the UK, Germany and other jurisdictions wire the right method automatically — e.g. ACB with Section 104 same-day and 30-day matching for the UK.

No. You choose the tracking depth per account or asset, anywhere on the spectrum from balance-only to full transaction history.

• Balance tracking: update an account's value periodically (monthly, quarterly, however often you want). Fast to maintain. Best for high-level wealth views, but limited for cost-basis analysis or tax filing.
• Transaction tracking: enter or import every buy, sell, dividend, and fee. Slower to set up, but unlocks tax-grade reporting (FIFO / LIFO / Average Cost / specific-lot), realised gains, and accurate cost basis.

Mix and match: track a wrap account or pension as a single balance, your IBKR account as full transactions, and a property as quarterly valuations. Switch a position from balance-only to full transactions later when the detail starts to matter — none of the historical data is lost.

Each asset has its own price history that you control. For anything without a public quote — private equity, real estate, collectibles, closed funds, art, watches, a startup stake — add it as a custom asset and feed in valuations manually, paste a price table, or import a CSV.

Once a price series exists, the asset behaves like any market-traded position: cost basis, time-weighted return, money-weighted return, FX attribution, and yield-on-cost all work the same way. The custom asset can also have its own dividends, rent, distributions, or expenses logged against it.

For positions you only re-value periodically (e.g. quarterly NAV statements from a fund), enter just the valuation dates you have — Capitally will hold the last value forward between updates or interpolate them.

Yes. Liabilities live in the same project as your assets — modelled as custom Loan or Mortgage assets with negative quantity — so the portfolio view shows Owned, Owed, and the Debt Ratio (owed / owned) side by side. Mortgages, margin loans, and lines of credit all fit the same pattern.

Interest payments and principal repayments record as separate transactions, so the cashflow they generate flows into the money-weighted return of both the liability and the asset it finances (e.g. a mortgage attached to the property it paid for).

Walkthroughs: Tracking Debt for general loans, Tracking Mortgage for mortgages with automatic interest calculations and real-estate linkage. Deeper liability features (built-in amortisation schedules, scenario modelling) are on the roadmap.

Yes. You can cancel anytime from Settings → Subscription, and you keep full access until the end of the period you've already paid for. Resubscribing at any point picks up exactly where you left off.

If your subscription ends, your data stays available for 6 months — long enough to come back without rebuilding anything. To delete it sooner, delete your account in Settings → My Profile.

Active subscriptions lock in the price from the day you signed up. If our pricing changes later, your rate stays the same as long as the subscription is continuous. Cancelling and resubscribing later means paying the current rate.

Plan switches work as a prorated credit. We calculate the unused portion of your current plan, apply it as credit toward the new one, and you pay only the difference. Downgrading means no further charges until the credit runs out.

Your financial data is end-to-end encrypted on your device with AES-GCM, using a key derived from your password — Capitally itself cannot decrypt it. We never connect to your broker or bank either: no Plaid, no Yodlee, no open-banking aggregator, no shared credentials. If our database were ever breached, the extracted data would be unreadable.

The CSV-only import path is also more accurate than aggregator sync. Broker exports usually go back to the day the account was opened and carry the corporate actions, dividend reinvestments and FX conversions that aggregators tend to drop — so cost basis stays auditable and returns reflect the real holding period.

We don't sell financial data, behavioural patterns, or any other personal information. Product analytics are limited to feature adoption and performance, are opt-out, and never include the size or value of your investments.

All servers and databases live in EU data centres, with TLS in transit, encryption at rest, and standard security practices on top of the per-user encryption. Export and permanent deletion are one-click operations inside the app — no email required.

For the full encryption model — including PBKDF2 key derivation, RSA-OAEP key wrapping, and how multi-device sync stays zero-knowledge — see the data safety guide.

Yes. You can export a filtered slice of your portfolio — selected positions, accounts, or transactions — to CSV, Excel, or Capitally's JSON format. The JSON export carries the underlying assets and accounts with it and can be re-imported into a separate Capitally account, useful when an advisor or accountant uses Capitally as well.

Live, read-only sharing of a portfolio subset is on the roadmap. Until then, exports are the privacy-preserving path: you decide exactly what leaves the encrypted store and in what format.

Market-traded assets — US stocks, US ETFs, currencies, crypto — refresh at least every 30 minutes during market hours, with end-of-day prices posted 15–60 minutes after the close. ex-US stocks, ex-US ETFs, indexes, mutual funds, commodities use end-of-day prices updated 30-240 minutes after market closes. See the supported markets and assets for full coverage.

Custom assets (private equity, real estate, collectibles, illiquid positions) hold the last user-entered valuation forward until you record a new one. You can update them manually, by paste, or by CSV import on whatever cadence makes sense — quarterly NAVs, annual appraisals, monthly checkpoints.