What Do All These Numbers Actually Mean?
A plain-English breakdown of Return, Gain/Loss $, Gain/Loss %, and CAGR — and why Rebalanced shows you all four.
Published April 21, 2026 • 8 min read
If you've poked around your portfolio in Rebalanced, you've probably noticed there are four different numbers measuring performance. And you've probably also wondered: why four? Isn't one enough?
The honest answer is that each one is answering a different question. Use the wrong one for the wrong question and you'll walk away with a genuinely misleading picture of how you're doing. So here's what each one actually means, in plain English.
Return (Money-Weighted)
The question it answers: How am I actually performing as an investor?
This is the headline number in Rebalanced, and it's the one we care most about getting right.
Here's the problem with the way most apps calculate returns: they just look at how much your account grew relative to everything you've put in. Sounds reasonable — until you add money mid-year. Say you start with $50,000 and you're crushing it — by June your account is worth $80,000. You're up 60%. Then you deposit another $40,000. Now your cost basis is $90,000 and your account is worth $120,000. Suddenly you're "only" up 33% — even though your investing decisions didn't change at all. You just added money.
Money-weighted return strips all of that out. It looks at exactly when cash went in and out, and calculates the return on the money that was actually invested, for the time it was actually invested.
The result is a number that reflects your performance as an investor — your timing, your picks, your allocation decisions — not how aggressively you saved that year.
This is the number you want when you're asking: "how is my investing actually going?"
Gain/Loss $
The question it answers: How much more money do I have than when I started?
This one has nothing to do with how well you're investing. It's a wealth metric, not a performance metric.
Gain/Loss $ is just: current value minus your cost basis. Put in $30,000, it's worth $38,000 today, you're up $8,000. That's it. No weighting, no annualizing, no judgment about whether you timed anything well.
It's the "did I double my money?" number. And sometimes that's exactly the right question — especially when you're zooming out and just want to know the raw score. Not "am I a good investor," but "do I have more than I put in, and by how much?"
It's also handy for tax planning, since realized gains and losses are dollar amounts, not percentages. But mostly it's just the clearest way to see the size of your wins and losses in terms that actually translate to real life.
Gain/Loss %
The question it answers: How much more do I have than when I started?
Same idea as Gain/Loss $, just expressed as a percentage. Put $30,000 in, it's worth $38,000 today, you're up 26.7%. That's it.
The formula: (Current Value − Cost Basis) ÷ Cost Basis × 100.
What it doesn't account for is time. A 26.7% gain over 2 years and a 26.7% gain over 20 years look identical here — this number doesn't care. It's also not adjusting for when money went in or out. It's purely: across everything I've ever put into this account, how much more do I have?
That makes it a useful gut-check — "am I ahead or behind on the money I've committed?" — but not a great way to evaluate how well you're actually investing. For that, Return is the right number.
CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate)
The question it answers: What's my annualized return — so I can actually compare things?
CAGR takes your money-weighted return and normalizes it into a "per year" number, so you can make apples-to-apples comparisons across different time periods.
Here's why that matters. Say you have two investments:
- Investment A: up 40% over 8 years
- Investment B: up 40% over 3 years
Same Gain/Loss %. Wildly different performance. CAGR surfaces the difference: Investment A is roughly 4.3% per year; Investment B is about 11.9% per year.
CAGR is also how most benchmarks and funds report performance — which means it's what you need if you want to compare yourself to an index. "Did I beat the S&P 500 last decade?" is really a CAGR question.
One thing to be aware of: CAGR assumes steady compounding, so it's most meaningful over longer timeframes. For a position you've held for 3 months, a 40% annualized CAGR is a bit of a fiction — it's just saying "if this kept up, that's what it'd be." Over multiple years, it becomes a much more meaningful signal.
The Short Version
| Metric | What it's measuring | Best used for |
|---|---|---|
| Return | Your investing performance, deposits stripped out | Overall portfolio truth |
| Gain/Loss $ | Raw dollars now vs. what you put in | Wealth check, tax planning |
| Gain/Loss % | Cost basis % change, no time adjustment | Quick gut-check: am I ahead of what I've put in? |
| CAGR | Annualized money-weighted return | Long-term comparisons, benchmark vs. yourself |
No single number tells the whole story. That's why Rebalanced shows you all four — because depending on what you're actually trying to figure out, the "right" answer changes.