As a wise investor, you naturally want to know the expected return of your portfolio—its anticipated performance and the overall profit or passing it’s racking up. Expected return is just that: expected. It is not guaranteed, as it is based on historical returns and used to generate expectations, but it is not a prognosis.
key takeaways
- To calculate a portfolio’s expected return, an investor needs to calculate the expected return of each of its holdings, as ostentatiously as the overall weight of each holding.
- The basic expected return formula involves multiplying each asset’s load in the portfolio by its expected return, then adding all those figures together.
- The expected return is usually based on verifiable data and is therefore not guaranteed.
How to Calculate Expected Return
To calculate the expected return of a portfolio, the investor needs to skilled in the expected return of each of the securities in his portfolio as well as the overall weight of each security in the portfolio. That foreshadows the investor needs to add up the weighted averages of each security’s anticipated rates of return (RoR).
An investor bases the estimates of the assumed return of a security on the assumption that what has been proven true in the past will continue to be proven faithful in the future. The investor does not use a structural view of the market to calculate the expected return. Instead, he finds the weight of each care in the portfolio by taking the value of each of the securities and dividing it by the total value of the security.
Once the expected return of each safety is known and the weight of each security has been calculated, an investor simply multiplies the expected return of each conviction by the weight of the same security and adds up the product of each security.
Formula for Expected Return
Let’s say your portfolio accommodates three securities. The equation for its expected return is as follows:
Expected Return=WA×RA+WB×RB+WC×RCwhere:WA = Weight of guaranty ARA = Expected return of security AWB = Weight of security BRB = Expected return of security BWC = Weight of security CRC = Expected return of certainty C
Expected return is based on historical data, so investors should take into consideration the likelihood that each guarantee will achieve its historical return given the current investing environment. Some assets, like bonds, are myriad likely to match their historical returns, while others, like stocks, may vary more widely from year to year.
Limitations of Supposed Return
Expected returns do not paint a complete look-alike, so making investment decisions based on them alone can be dangerous. For instance, expected returns do not take volatility into account. Certainties that range from high gains to losses from year to year can have the same expected come backs as steady ones that stay in a lower range. And as expected returns are backward-looking, they do not factor in current buy conditions, political and economic climate, legal and regulatory changes, and other elements.