How to measure investment performance

One major factor in any investor’s decision to hold or sell an investment is often the performance of the stock or fund—aka how it’s doing. Is it growing over time?

To help you assess how your investments are doing, the Plynk app shows a couple different performance figures.

Investment change

Once you’ve invested at least $10 in your Plynk account, you’ll see what's called your Investment Change on the Portfolio screen.

This number shows your “investment rate of return.” It’s the growth or decline in the value of all your investments combined (including any interest or dividends you earned).*

Rate of return is shown as a percentage, which can be positive or negative depending on how your investments performed during a given time period. It will likely fluctuate over time, so you might see different percentages for different time periods.

For example, if your investment change says +8.20% for the 1-month period, but -3.50% for the 1-year period, it means the value of your investments increased 8.20% over the last month but has overall declined by 3.50% over the last year.

Market comparisons

On each stock or fund’s details screen, you may see a comparison between the rate of return of that particular investment and the average market return.

Plynk uses the S&P 500 market index as a guide for the stock market as a whole. So you’ll be able to see whether that individual investment has performed better or worse than the stock market average.

For example, it may read something like: BIG CORP’s growth of 12% over the past year has been less than the market average of 18%.

Of course, the S&P 500 is just one benchmark that you can use to compare. You may also find it helpful to compare your stock or fund’s performance to other market indexes related to its sector, region, size, etc. For index funds specifically, you can easily compare their performance against the performance of the market index that they mimic.