Jim inspires me to also attempt to figure out my long term returns. I keep most of my equity investment (~90%) with one major broker so I am just going to read off from that one performance page instead of making my own calculation. Over the years I deposited and withdrew capitals from the account so it might as well be biased data. I think my investment portfolio outperforms the market a little but having moved money in and out of the account might have made it ambiguous (?). I just have little interest tracking the correct handle of my return.

My portfolio is up by $380,000+ per year (if I include YTD result as full year result for 2023) over the last 19 years. I had withdrew a net of 4.2 mil+ from the account during the period. I think I had paid less than 100k in equity capital gain tax ever given my being under an advantageous tax jurisdiction that only taxes local income. It says on the performance page that my cumulative return was 307% (vs S&P's 235%) over 10 years. The brokerage data seems to have been contaminated pre-2004 (in terms of P/L calculation) when the broker updated their system so I stripped out my gain pre-2004. I only had a relatively small portfolio earlier and any of my gain is pure blind luck pre-2004 anyway.

As for my background - I retired 23 years ago after working 11 years in the financial industry post grad school. I had most of my money tied up in unvested company shares and a syndicated lending facility initially and only started to invest more seriously about five years into my retirement. My portfolio ramped up from Mar 2005 when I shifted my holdings into equity while always keeping a decent buffer in cash. I never ever had any meaningful borrowing except when I borrow cheap yen for 10 years from 2008 to invest in Japanese stocks.