Normally I just take the absolute dollars to measure my gain and loss in my share investment as it is the most “TRUE” indicator which tells me whether I am making money or not. I am choosing to avoid popular function like XIRR to calculate annualized returns as it is just an indicator to make thing look nicer only.
Let me give an example, if you have invested for 10 years, the XIRR will just show 10 different values of return in each of the 10 years. What is the point to see these values if your true return in dollar is zero?
If your return is negative, XIRR values may only have the consoling effect telling you that some percentage of the investment money is lost in each of 10 years, but in effect you are losing much more in term of absolute percentage.
If your return is positive, XIRR values are just nice figures to show other that you are making some percentage from your investment for each of the 10 years. But how much in absolute dollar, no one will know.
