Notice your 'all-time' returns on Blossom are slightly different than what appears on your brokerage?
This difference can be because all-time returns on Blossom don’t take into account any profit or losses from any trades you’ve made, since we don’t have access to that data.
👉 It is currently a reflection of the open return of your current holdings:
This means we compare the average buy price of each stock in your portfolio with the stock's current price and calculate the difference based on the number of shares you hold.
How some brokerages calculate all-time returns:
Some brokerages calculate all-time returns based on all the trades you've made in your trading history. Trade include purchases as well.
For example, if you purchased $XXX at $30 one day and then at $20 another day, and now the current trading price of $XXX is $40, your return on $30 is 33% and your return on $20 is 100%. It would calculate the returns based on those two different purchase prices and the amount of time you've held them for individually, showing a ~66.5% return.
To make things even more complicated, some brokerages even take into account the cash available to trade someone is holding over this time duration. A few brokerages even show annualized returns instead.
How Blossom calculates all-time returns:
On Blossom, we calculate all-time returns based on your overall average purchase price of each of your holdings at the present moment.
For example, even if you purchased the same number of shares of $XXX at $30 on one day and $20 on another day, the average purchase price of $XXX is $25. If the current trading price is now $40, your return shown on Blossom would be 60%.
Wealthsimple and Questrade all-time returns:
For Wealtsimple and Questrade, Blossom calculates this directly from your brokerage. Snaptrade pulls the exact return number as shown in your brokerage account.
Note: If you have Wealthsimple + another brokerage linked it will use a weighted average of the two. This means we don’t just take a simple average of your returns across brokerages — instead, we account for how much money you have in each account.
For example:
If you have $9,000 invested at Wealthsimple with a return of +10%, and $1,000 with another brokerage with a return of +20%, we don’t average them to say “15%.”
Instead, we weight them by size: most of your money is at Wealthsimple, so the combined return is closer to 11%.
For all other brokerages, we use the average buy price explained earlier in the article.
We’re working on adding in more functionality for profits and losses made from trades, but in the meantime hopefully that additional context helps 😇
If you have any other questions about using Blossom, please feel free to message us by going to Settings > Get Help where we will respond within 24hours 😊