The number sat on my broker's home screen, green, precise to two decimals. Roughly eighteen thousand dollars, earned from investing, over the whole period I'd been at it.
I looked at it for a long time and realised I didn't know what it included.
Dividends — reinvested ones, or only the ones that landed as cash? Before or after the tax withheld in a country I don't live in? Closed positions, or only open ones? Fees? Measured from my first-ever deposit, or from the day I opened this account and transferred everything across?
Each of those moves the number. Some move it by thousands.
That's a familiar shape if you write software: an aggregate whose query you can't see. I spent a while looking for the drill-down and eventually understood there wasn't one to find. The breakdown didn't exist. Nobody was keeping the events — not the broker, not my spreadsheet, not any of the tools I tried.
