Key insights
- The author highlights the challenges in accurately benchmarking portfolio performance, especially across multiple currencies and asset classes. The author points out that currency movements can significantly impact returns, particularly for US-heavy portfolios. This suggests that investors may need to adjust their performance expectations and risk management strategies to account for currency fluctuations, potentially leading to a slight decrease in demand for US equities from international investors.
I've been investing for a few years across ETFs, stocks, and some crypto, and one thing I kept struggling with was tracking performance properly across different currencies.
Most portfolio trackers I tried were either very US-focused, didn't handle EUR/USD well, or relied heavily on broker syncing, which I personally prefer to avoid.
While trying to solve it for myself, a few things became obvious:
- A lot of return calculations don't really reflect deposit timing, which makes portfolio performance hard to interpret * Benchmarking only makes sense if you compare over the exact same period you were invested * Currency movements often explain more of the result than many people realize, especially with US-heavy portfolios
I ended up building a small tracker for myself (TrackinV) mainly to solve the multi-currency side of it - free to use if anyone is curious.