Return Matters: Part 1

Doing something for the mere joy of it – for one’s self or others – is quite possibly one of the best returns on an investment of time that a person can receive.” – Laurie Buchanan, Ph.D. (author)

Perhaps someday, we’ll be able to explicitly measure the joy associated with how we spend our time – and maybe that will even have implications for how we approach financial planning. After all, it would be cool if we could estimate the likelihood of joy based on the path a person pursues and incorporate that with the financial side of the picture. But I digress. For now, we have a variety of return measurements to help assess investment managers, advisors, portfolios, and – of course – Alts. A basic understanding of “what’s what” across that return-measurement spectrum can have a lot of utility.

After laying a lot of groundwork for the edition of Alt Blend entitled Incoming: Part 4 –– we discussed the significant difference between taxable gain/loss and total return. Unsurprisingly, investors often assume the associated gain or loss shown on their account-holdings screen or statement is the same as the performance. It required four blog posts to differentiate between tax basis and total return properly, but I think we can be more efficient in exploring various return measures – and that’s the journey we embark on together today. Here we go.

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