Inflation Explained: What the Numbers in Turbobulls Mean

The One Question

Inflation never changes how many euros you have. It changes what they buy. So every figure here compares two things today: what the same things cost now, and what your money is now.

An example. A loaf of bread cost EUR 1 on Mar 1 and costs EUR 1.10 today: prices rose 10%. On Mar 1 you had EUR 100, EUR 40 in cash and EUR 60 invested, and your investments have grown 20% since.

Short means prices outran that money. Left over means the money beat them. The prices come from an official price index: each month, a country's statistics office prices the same basket of everyday goods and services.

Every Figure at a Glance

The Overview's Portfolio tab repeats some of these: MWR annualized after inflation, the break-even line on its Performance chart, and in Advanced analytics, Growth rate "a year after inflation" and Time-weighted return "after inflation".

The Net Worth Chart: Hover a Past Date

On the Overview, hover over (or tap) a past date on the Total net worth chart. Net worth is the cash in your accounts, plus your investments at market value, plus cash at your brokers, minus what you owe. Broker cash counts with Investments on Full tracking, the default, not with Performance only.

Say that date's EUR 100,000 was EUR 30,000 in cash and EUR 70,000 invested, with no debts. Prices have risen 12.4% since, and the investments grew to EUR 90,000:

The top three rows treat that day's net worth as if it had all been cash: a what-if, not a loss you took. The shaded box, "What that day's money buys today", uses how you really held it. Red means that money buys less than it did, green that it buys more.

Good to know

• Cash is that day's cash times the price rise, whatever you did with it later, so you can check it by hand.
• A date before your first investment has no Investments rows. The last date has no rows: it is today.
• For a range that ended in the past, the rows count to its last month, as in "Prices to Jun 2025".
• With Full tracking, moving money from a bank account to a broker changes nothing: it is cash either way. A negative broker balance counts as zero.
• Debts are in neither box row. The box rows add up to your change after inflation only if nothing was saved, spent or moved since.
• The Inflation chip above the chart draws each date's "Same things cost today" as a dotted line. It sits above your net worth whenever prices rose: that gap is normal, not a score.

How "Their value since then" is worked out. It is your portfolio's time-weighted return (TWR) from that date to today, the same return as TWR on the Portfolio page. It starts from what your investments were worth that day, not what you paid. It counts price moves, dividends, fees, taxes and currency moves, but never money you put in or took out afterwards. That is why a small price rise can sit beside a large "buy less": the investments themselves fell.

Say your investments were worth EUR 50,000. The market rose 10%, to EUR 55,000. You bought EUR 20,000 more, making EUR 75,000, and the market then fell 10%, to EUR 67,500. Their value since then: 1.10 x 0.90 = 0.99, so -1.0%. Comparing EUR 67,500 with EUR 50,000 would say +35%, but EUR 20,000 of that was new money.

To check it, start the date range on that date on both the Overview and the Portfolio page, with no broker filter: the line then equals the Portfolio page's TWR.

"After Inflation" Beside the Change for a Date Range

Pick a date range on the Overview and the change appears twice. Say your net worth went from EUR 100,000 to EUR 130,000 while prices rose 12.4%:

• +EUR 30,000 this period is the plain change.
• +EUR 17,600 (+15.66%) after inflation: to stand still, EUR 100,000 needed to become EUR 112,400, and you ended EUR 17,600 above that (17,600 / 112,400 = 15.66%).

It includes money you saved, not only investment gains, as Year to date does, and it needs a range of at least 28 days. For a year or more, Growth rate (CAGR) in Advanced analytics adds "a year after inflation": EUR 100,000 to EUR 121,000 in two years is 10.00% a year, and with prices up 8% in those two years, "+5.8% a year after inflation". See Growth rate (CAGR).

Wallet: Cash Lost to Inflation

Under Balance, a line such as "EUR 498 lost to inflation since 2025" adds up, day by day, what rising prices took from the cash in your wallet accounts while it was there. Cash at brokers is not in it.

Say you held EUR 10,000 from January 2025 and added EUR 5,000 later. Prices rose 2% before the EUR 5,000 arrived, and 4% in all. The info icon beside Balance shows:

Not 4% of EUR 15,000 (EUR 600): the first EUR 10,000 lost the full 4% (EUR 400), the later EUR 5,000 only the rise after it arrived (EUR 98).

Good to know

• Days below zero count as nothing. If prices fell, it reads "gained from falling prices".
• With no date filter, it starts on the first day your accounts held cash.
• Category, tag, type, amount and search filters hide it, since Balance then shows only part of your money.
• Interest your account paid is not subtracted: compare it with this figure to see whether a savings account kept up.
• Holding some cash is often deliberate: this is the price of an emergency buffer. Cash runway puts it in context.
• The hover's Cash row is a different figure: it takes only one date's cash, broker cash included, times the price rise since.

Portfolio: Did Your Investments Beat Inflation?

Investments can grow faster or slower than prices, so the question is whether they kept up. On this page, a deposit is money going into your investments (a purchase), and a withdrawal is money coming out (a sale, or a dividend paid to you).

TWR after inflation (Performance tab): how much your investments grew your buying power, whatever the timing of your deposits. TWR +20.0% with prices up 12.4% gives (1 + 20.0%) / (1 + 12.4%) - 1 = +6.8%, not 7.6%: EUR 120 at the new prices buys what EUR 106.76 bought before. Its chart adds a dotted line, such as "Euro area inflation", over the same stretches TWR counts.

MWR and Annualized MWR after inflation: did your actual money beat inflation, given when you put it in and took it out? Each deposit and withdrawal is carried forward by inflation from its own day. EUR 10,000 invested once, worth EUR 12,000 two years later, with prices up 8%:

The EUR 10,000 needed to become EUR 10,800, and EUR 12,000 is 11.1% more. The charts draw the "Inflation" row as a dotted line, "Euro area inflation on your deposits": above it, your money beat inflation.

The Market value break-even (Value tab, Market value): what your investments would need to be worth just to keep up. It is the money you put in, less the money you took out, each carried forward by inflation from its own day. EUR 10,000 two years ago and EUR 5,000 one year ago, with prices up 3% a year, needed EUR 10,609 + EUR 5,150 = EUR 15,759. At a market value of EUR 17,000, the chart's hover says Ahead of inflation by EUR 1,241, with "From your first investment to this date" under it.

Good to know

• Each "Inflation" row covers the stretches its own money lived through: TWR skips stretches with nothing invested, and MWR weighs most the times when more of your money was in.
• TWR after inflation above zero with MWR after inflation below it means your investments beat inflation, but more of your money was in during the weaker stretches.
• The MWR line can have gaps: some mixes of money in and out have no single answer, and once you have taken out more than you put in, there is nothing left to beat.
• With a date range, the portfolio's value at the start counts as money put in. Dividends and profitable sales lower the break-even, so it can sit below Invested principal. That is normal.
• ROI, Lifetime ROI and Win rate have no after-inflation version: they compare each position with what you paid for it.

Choosing the Index

The Inflation control sits next to the date range on the Portfolio page (Value and Performance tabs) and the Wallet page. Its panel, "Compare with inflation", lists the indexes for your display currency, with one marked Suggested. It is on by default and one setting for every page: None turns it off everywhere. The inflation figures are part of Turbo Pro, and of every trial. On the other plans the control shows a PRO label, and clicking it shows the plans.

The index follows your display currency, not where you live: euro figures are measured against euro prices, since another currency's inflation would count exchange-rate moves as inflation.

If you live in Spain and view in euros, you can pick Spain instead of the euro area average. Other display currencies have no inflation figures.

Where the Data Comes From

The figures use official monthly consumer price indexes: HICP from Eurostat (the euro area, each EU country, Norway, Switzerland and Türkiye), CPI from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and CPI from the UK Office for National Statistics. Turbobulls pins each month's figure to the middle of its month and moves in small equal steps between them. The monthly index is official; every daily value and after-inflation figure is our own calculation.

Each popover names the index and its latest month in one grey line, for example "Euro area prices (Eurostat), up to Aug 2026." At the bottom of the Inflation control's panel, a Sources and licences link opens this section. Here is the notice each source asks for:

• Source: Eurostat, HICP (prc_hicp_minr). Daily values and real returns are calculated by Turbobulls. Eurostat bears no responsibility for these calculations. doi.org/10.2908/PRC_HICP_MINR
• Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U all items, not seasonally adjusted (CUUR0000SA0). Daily values and real returns are calculated by Turbobulls from these data. BLS.gov cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from BLS.gov.
• Source: Office for National Statistics, CPI index D7BT. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Daily values and real returns are calculated by Turbobulls.

The latest weeks are estimated. A month's figure is published some weeks after the month ends. Until then, Turbobulls estimates from the past year's rate, and the popover adds "Later days are estimated." The real figure replaces the estimate when it arrives. If none arrives, the estimate stops about three months after the middle of the latest published month, and the figures show as not available.

When a Figure Says "Not Available"

On the Wallet, the Balance line reads "Lost to inflation: not available". On the Portfolio, a tile reads "After inflation: not available". The info icon beside it says why. On the Overview, the figures simply do not appear.

The Math, in One Table

Every figure starts from the price factor: the index at the end of the range divided by the index on an earlier day. Prices up 12.4% give a factor of 1.124.

Common Questions

Q: Prices rose 12.4%, so why does my old money buy only 11% less?

Q: Why does the Overview show a different amount ahead of inflation than the Portfolio chart on the same date?

The Full Picture: Pair These With the Inflation Figures

Turbobulls is a tracking and analytics tool, not an investment adviser. Nothing here is investment, tax, or legal advice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Do your own research or consult a licensed professional.

The inflation figures appear on your Overview, Wallet and Portfolio whenever your display currency has an index. See yours →