How Compndr works

Two things move your portfolio value: money you add, and the market. They look identical on a chart and they are completely different, so Compndr keeps them apart.

A simple worked example

The figures below are invented for illustration. They are not a real account, not a typical result, and not anything Compndr expects your portfolio to do.

To keep the arithmetic readable this example is deliberately the simplest possible case: one holding, bought twice, in a single currency, with no sales, no withdrawals, no dividends and no fees. In that narrow case return is simply the value today minus the money put in. A real portfolio usually has more going on, and the figures then follow from the transactions you have actually recorded.

Notice what happens in April. The portfolio value jumps by $5,000 in a single day, but nothing was earned — $5,000 simply moved from a bank account into the portfolio. The return is unchanged at $500. That is the most common misreading of any tracker, and it is why Compndr separates the two rather than reporting one headline number.

June shows the other half of it. The money put in is still $10,000 — nothing was taken out — but the return is now negative, because the market fell. Money in changes only when you move money; return changes with the market.

Most people arrive with years of investing already behind them and incomplete records of it. Compndr is built for that rather than against it.

If Compndr does not know what you paid for a holding, it says so instead of guessing. Unknown is never treated as zero. A position with no cost basis still appears, still counts toward your portfolio value, and is simply excluded from return figures that would otherwise be fiction. The same rule applies to a holding with no available market price: it is shown as unpriced rather than silently valued.

Your performance chart can only start where your records start. If you enter a holding you bought five years ago but only supply this year's transactions, the chart begins this year — Compndr will not invent the missing four years, and it discloses where history had to be withheld rather than drawing a straight line across the gap.

You can also deliberately exclude a past holding from your performance history — useful for something you tracked briefly and no longer want distorting the shape of the chart. That exclusion is reversible, and the underlying transactions are never deleted.

File and screenshot imports end in a review step: the rows are shown as drafts and are only written into your portfolio once you accept them. Assets are identified through the same shared registry no matter which path they arrived by, so the same coin or ticker does not end up as two different things depending on how you imported it. Anything Compndr cannot confidently identify is left as unclassified rather than being guessed into the wrong asset class.

Imports go into whichever portfolio you currently have selected. They never write to another one.

Compndr can watch a public wallet address on Ethereum, Solana or Bitcoin and read the balances held there. That is the whole of it.

Compndr never asks for a seed phrase, a private key, a wallet password or a signature, and cannot move, spend or approve anything. If anyone ever asks you for those in Compndr's name, it is not us.

A public address shows what is there now. It does not show what you paid, so wallet holdings arrive with unknown cost basis unless you add the purchase details yourself. If a token's details cannot be confirmed on a refresh, Compndr keeps the last balance it could verify rather than reporting a zero it has not proven.

Projection takes your current portfolio and extends it forward under assumptions you enter — how much you plan to contribute, how often, and what annual growth rate you want to model. You choose the growth rate; Compndr does not pick one for you and does not endorse one.

The output is arithmetic, not a prediction. A projection at 7% is a statement about compounding at 7%; it is not a claim that your portfolio will grow at 7%, and real markets do not deliver a smooth annual rate. Every assumption is shown alongside the result so you can see exactly what produced the line.

Goals work the same way: you set the target and the timeframe, and Compndr shows the gap between the two under your own assumptions.