TWR vs MWRR: time-weighted or money-weighted return?

Time-weighted vs money-weighted return comes down to two questions. Time-weighted return (TWR) measures how your investments performed, regardless of when you deposited or withdrew money. Money-weighted return (MWRR, also IRR or XIRR) measures what your money actually earned, including the timing of your deposits. Comparing against an index? Use TWR. For your own result, use MWRR.

Seeing two returns in Portfolio Performance, Parqet or another tracker that don’t match? That’s usually not a mistake. Time-weighted vs money-weighted return is about two different questions: how did your investment perform, and how did your money perform? This guide shows the difference with real prices, and which figure to use when.

DEGIRO return: why you see neither TWR nor MWRR

In your DEGIRO portfolio you see “Total P/L” and a daily P/L. Total P/L is your total profit or loss since you opened the account. It includes realised and unrealised gains, dividends, currency effects and transaction costs (DEGIRO helpdesk). The daily P/L is today’s result compared with the previous closing price.

Those are amounts in euros, not a return per year. Turn them into a percentage yourself and you get “ending value minus contributions, divided by contributions”. That figure ignores when you deposited. A deposit from last month counts just as heavily as one from five years ago.

Asked “Where can I find my return?”, DEGIRO’s Dutch helpdesk points you to calculating it yourself: with the export in your portfolio, the annual statement (Inbox > Documents) or the account statement (Inbox > Account Statement) (DEGIRO helpdesk, in Dutch). So DEGIRO shows no TWR and no MWRR. How to get from that data to an actual return is explained in calculating your DEGIRO return.

What is time-weighted return (TWR)?

Time-weighted return (TWR) is the return of your investments themselves, without the effect of your deposits and withdrawals. It answers the question: how did one euro perform that was invested for the whole period?

It works in three steps:

1. Split the period at every deposit or withdrawal.
2. Calculate the return for each sub-period: the value just before the next deposit, divided by the value right after the previous one, minus 1.
3. Link those returns by multiplying them together.

TWR = (1 + r1) × (1 + r2) × … × (1 + rn) − 1

Here r1 is the return in the first sub-period, r2 in the second, and so on. Each sub-period is measured on its own, so your timing and the size of your deposits drop out.

That’s why TWR is the yardstick for comparing funds and managers: a manager doesn’t decide when clients add money. Investment firms that report under the CFA Institute’s GIPS standards therefore generally use time-weighted returns.

An exact TWR needs the value of your portfolio on every day money goes in or out. Some tools therefore approximate TWR with the Modified Dietz method, which weights deposits within a period by the number of days they were invested.

What is money-weighted return (MWRR)?

Money-weighted return (MWRR, money-weighted rate of return) is the annual return at which all your deposits, withdrawals and your ending value add up to exactly zero. That’s the internal rate of return, the IRR, of your cash flows. Because your deposits fall on irregular dates, you calculate it in Excel or Google Sheets with XIRR.

Think of it this way. Suppose you’d put every deposit into a savings account paying a fixed annual rate. What rate would you have needed to end up with the same ending value? That percentage is your MWRR.

Every euro counts for as long as it was invested. A large deposit just before a rise lifts your MWRR. A large deposit just before a fall lowers it. Withdrawals work the other way round. So MWRR measures your own result, including your timing and the size of your deposits.

The concept goes by many names. MWR, MWRR, IRR and XIRR mean the same thing in practice. German tools call it IZF (interner Zinsfuß), Spanish ones TIR (tasa interna de retorno).

There’s no formula that gives the answer directly. The IRR is found step by step, and your spreadsheet does that for you.

TWR and MWRR at a glance

Both figures are correct. They just answer different questions. The table puts the differences side by side.

Worked example: four investors, the same ETF, four outcomes

Four investors put their money into the same ETF in 2025: iShares Core MSCI World UCITS ETF (IWDA) on Euronext Amsterdam, in euros and accumulating (no dividend payouts). From a peak of €108.82 on 19 February, the price fell to €85.32 on 9 April, after the import tariffs of early April. On 31 December it stood at €111.53.

• A invests €12,000 in one go on 2 January.
• B invests €1,000 on the first trading day of every month.
• C does the same as B, plus an extra €10,000 at the peak on 19 February.
• D does the same as B, plus an extra €10,000 at the low on 9 April.

The TWR is the same for all four: +5.9% (€111.53 ÷ €105.30 − 1). TWR only measures the ETF, and it did the same for everyone.

The “gain ÷ contributed” column resembles what you get when you divide DEGIRO’s Total P/L by what you put in.

Source and assumptions. Daily closing prices of IWDA in euros from Yahoo Finance, retrieved on 18 October 2026. Period: 2 January to 31 December 2025. No transaction costs, fractional shares, and every deposit invested immediately. The MWRR was calculated with the same method as Excel’s XIRR function. For A it is exactly 5.95%: slightly above the TWR, because the period is just short of a year.

What this example shows:

1. Same TWR, very different MWRR. The MWRR ranges from 5.9% to 30.0%. The difference is entirely down to timing. That’s the heart of TWR vs MWRR.
2. MWRR can be far higher than gain ÷ contributed. For B the MWRR is 14.1%, while gain ÷ contributed is 7.4%. B’s money was invested for only about half a year on average, and MWRR is an annual return. On top of that, from April to July B bought below the starting price of €105.30.
3. One deposit at the wrong moment weighs heavily. C deposited €10,000 at the peak. That pulls the MWRR down from 14.1% to 7.6%.
4. The same deposit at the low works the other way. D made the same extra deposit on 9 April and ends up at 30.0%. His gain is more than four times B’s.
5. Each figure answers its own question. To compare with the MSCI World index, look at TWR. For what your own money earned, look at MWRR. D didn’t pick a better investment than A, just a different moment.

Calculating your return: which figure to use when?

• Comparing with the MSCI World or S&P 500, or judging your fund choice: TWR. Only TWR removes your own timing, just like the index figure does. How to do this fairly is covered in comparing with the MSCI World. That guide also shows a second method: simulating your deposits into the index at the same moments.
• What your own money earned, and whether your timing helped: MWRR. Put your MWRR next to your TWR. If the MWRR is higher, your timing helped. If it’s lower, your timing cost you return.
• Dutch Box 3 and the counter-evidence scheme (tegenbewijsregeling): neither. What counts there is your actual return in euros, not a percentage. What counts in Box 3 is explained in Dutch Box 3 and investing.
• One lump sum, nothing added or withdrawn: CAGR is enough. Without interim deposits, TWR, MWRR and CAGR coincide.

Why TWR and MWRR can be far apart

The gap grows in four situations:

• Large deposits relative to what you already had. Adding €10,000 to €5,000 weighs much more than adding it to €200,000.
• Investing just before a fall or a rise. You saw that with C and D.
• Withdrawals. Take money out before a fall and your MWRR ends up above your TWR. Take it out before a rise and it ends up below.
• Short periods. MWRR is an annual return. Over a few weeks, that produces absurd outliers. If a position rises 2% in ten days, that annualises to more than 100% a year. That’s why ClearAnalyser shows “—” instead of an IRR for positions held for less than about 30 days.

The gap itself is information too. It shows whether your timing added return or cost you. To see which holdings drove your result, look at your return contribution per position.

Doing it yourself in Excel or Google Sheets

You calculate your MWRR with XIRR:

1. Export your account statement as a CSV via Inbox > Account Statement. How that works is explained in exporting a DEGIRO CSV.
2. List your deposits and withdrawals: amounts in column A, dates in column B. Deposits are negative, withdrawals positive. Leave out buys and sells, because that money stays inside your account.
3. Add the current value of your account (positions plus cash) as a positive amount at the bottom, dated today.
4. Use =XIRR(A2:A30, B2:B30). Depending on your locale, the argument separator may be a semicolon.

Note: DEGIRO exports with a comma as the decimal separator and dates as dd-MM-yyyy, even with an English interface. Check that your spreadsheet reads them as numbers and dates.

TWR by hand is harder. You need the value of your whole portfolio on every day you deposited or withdrew money, and that isn’t in the CSV. You rebuild that value for each date from your positions and that day’s closing prices. With monthly deposits that’s twelve reconstructions a year, and one mistake breaks the whole chain.

TWR and MWRR side by side in ClearAnalyser

ClearAnalyser is a Chrome extension that reads along in the DEGIRO web trader. You log in to DEGIRO yourself, no CSV is needed and processing happens locally in your browser.

The Compound interest tab shows TWR and MWR side by side for the same period: 30 days, 6 months, YTD, 1 year or all time. Both include dividends. This tab is Premium (€3.50 a month or €39 a year).

For free, the Positions tab shows an IRR per position: the money-weighted return of each holding on its own. Positions held for less than about 30 days show “—”.

Which other tools show TWR or MWRR is covered in DEGIRO portfolio trackers compared.

Frequently asked questions

Is MWRR the same as IRR or XIRR?

Yes. MWRR is the IRR of your deposits, withdrawals and ending value. XIRR is the Excel function that calculates the IRR for cash flows on irregular dates, such as deposits into a brokerage account.

Can TWR be positive while MWRR is negative?

Yes. Say your investment rises sharply in spring and falls in autumn, and you make a large deposit just before that fall. Over the whole year the investment ends higher, so the TWR is positive. But most of your money only went through the fall, so your MWRR can be negative.

Which return does DEGIRO itself show?

Neither TWR nor MWRR. DEGIRO shows Total P/L: your total profit or loss in euros since you opened the account. For a return figure, DEGIRO refers you to calculating it yourself.

What does TTWROR mean in Portfolio Performance and Parqet?

TTWROR stands for True Time-Weighted Rate of Return. It’s the name Portfolio Performance and Parqet use for time-weighted return. The money-weighted return is called IZF (interner Zinsfuß) in their German interfaces, which you can read as IRR or MWRR.

Is TWR the same as CAGR?

Not quite. CAGR is the annual growth of an amount without interim deposits. TWR removes the effect of deposits, so it also works when you add money. Without additional deposits, the annualised TWR equals the CAGR.

Sources: What are Total P/L and values in my account? — DEGIRO · Waar kan ik mijn rendement vinden? — DEGIRO (Dutch) · Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS) — CFA Institute · iShares Core MSCI World UCITS ETF (IWDA.AS), historical prices — Yahoo Finance