Portfolio Performance

The "return" a broker app displays is usually the crudest kind: current value minus money paid in. That number badly distorts reality once you invest regularly, withdraw partway, or receive dividends — and it cannot answer what your annualized return actually was.

Portfolio Performance exists to compute that properly. 4,022 stars, EPL-1.0, maintained for years by a German developer.

It calculates two professional measures:

• Internal rate of return (IRR), which accounts for when each cash flow occurred and yields your genuine annualized return. With regular contributions and irregular top-ups, this is the real number.
• Time-weighted return (TWR), which strips out the effect of money moving in and out to measure how the holdings themselves performed — the fair basis for comparison against an index.

Both typically differ substantially from what a broker app shows, and both are the correct answers.

Other capabilities:

• Complete transaction records: purchases, sales, dividends, splits, fees and taxes, across multiple currencies with exchange rate conversion.
• Allocation analysis breaking holdings down by class, region, sector and currency, with target allocations and drift shown for rebalancing.
• Historical charts: value curves, benchmark comparison and drawdown analysis.
• Automatic price updates from public data sources — this step uses the network, but it only fetches quotes and never uploads your holdings.
• Imports of transactions from many brokers' statements and CSV files.

To be clear about:

• It does not connect to brokers automatically. It will not log into your brokerage to sync positions — which is both a drawback (manual entry or statement import) and a feature (your brokerage credentials never go to third-party software). CSV format support is strongest for European brokers; elsewhere you may need to reshape the data yourself.
• It is a record-keeping tool, not a trading terminal. No live quotes, no technical analysis, no order placement. Watch the market in your broker's app; do the accounting here.
• There is a learning cost. IRR, TWR, benchmarks and rebalancing are concepts you need to understand; the software only computes them. Beginners should start by recording transactions and reading the overall return, learning the analysis features as they become relevant.
• The interface is Java (Eclipse RCP) styling — dense with features, not elegant, and a few seconds slower to start than a native app.
• Backups are your responsibility, since everything lives in one local file.

How it relates to the others here: GnuCash does comprehensive double-entry bookkeeping and can track investments, though its return analysis is less specialized; Actual Budget handles monthly budgeting; Portfolio Performance focuses on the portfolio. Many people run one tool for everyday spending and this one for investments.