Tom's example is both accurate and realistic.

All I can do at this point is take an account balance at the beginning of
the period, the account balance at the end of the period, and add or subtract
based on cash added or subtracted. This is a hassle.

Miles

"Tom Z" wrote:

- quote -

The ROI and return calcs in Money are completely screwed up and useless other
than for measuring one-time buy and sell of an investment. If there are cash
flows or multiple transactions in the same holding the calculations are not
accurate - what a mess.

Consider this:
1. on 1/1/05 you open an account with $1000 and buy 100 shares of ST at $10

2. on 2/1/05 you sell the 100 ST at $11 and put the $1100 into a money
market acount MM.

3. on 3/1/05 you buy 100 ST at $10, taking the money from MM.

4. on 4/1/05 you sell 100 ST for $11 and put the $1100 into MM

After these transactions you have made $200 on your initial investment of
$1000, so you should have a ROI of 20% right? In fact both the ROI on your
account and the ROI on ST should be 20%. But according to Money, the ROI on
your account is 4.8% and the ROI on ST is 10%.

Totally useless software for calculating returns; I originally found this
problem in Money 2003, so I downloaded the trial Money 2006 thinking that
maybe it had been fixed - but no luck.

To add insult to injury, you can't even download a report to Excel and set
up a formula yourself to correctly compute ROI because you would need to have
details of each buy/sell pair for each stock and Money clumps them all
together so that you can't separate the cash flows and therefore can't
compute ROI.

You can compute overall portfolio ROI by downloading the "Performance by
Investment Type" report into Excel and setting up a formula for the overall
portfolio.

How does one report this bug by the way so maybe we can get it fixed for the
next version?

"Cal Learner-- MVP" wrote:

- quote -

In microsoft.public.money, Miles wrote:

- quote -

What makes it look as if the TR 3MTh and TR Yr columns do not take
those factors into account?

I'm using MS Money Premium 06 and wonder what the best way is to measure
quarterly and annual investment performance, given that cash flows in/out and
stocks are bought/sold during the period being measured.

There are several Portfolio views that provide a general total return for 3
and 12 months but it doesn't look like it takes into account the above
issues. Perhaps a Report is more appropriate?

Any assistance is appreciated.

Thanks,

Miles