What is ROI?

ROI, return on investment, is the gain or loss on a position divided by what you paid for it, usually as a percentage: buy for a thousand, hold something worth fifteen hundred, and the ROI is fifty percent. It is the simplest performance number and the one most people mean when they ask how an investment did.

Simple is also its weakness. ROI ignores time, so a fifty percent return over ten years and the same return over ten days read identically; it ignores cash flows, so a portfolio you kept adding to has no single cost to divide by; and it ignores realised versus unrealised, so a position that was up fifty percent and is now flat counts as zero rather than as a missed exit.

Better measures exist for each gap. Annualised return puts time back; time-weighted and money-weighted returns handle deposits and withdrawals differently, one measuring the strategy and the other the investor; and splitting realised from unrealised gains shows what is money and what is still a number on a screen.

For crypto the additional wrinkle is the reference: ROI in dollars, or in bitcoin? A portfolio that doubled in dollars while bitcoin tripled underperformed the simplest alternative. Benchmarking against BTC and ETH is the crypto-native way to ask whether the effort was worth it.

TrueHold shows realised and unrealised PnL against a weighted average cost basis, flow-adjusted performance that accounts for deposits and withdrawals, and benchmarks against BTC and ETH, which together answer the question ROI only pretends to.

Fees are part of every one of these numbers. Trading fees, gas, funding and spreads reduce the return, and a portfolio that trades often can show a positive ROI on paper and a negative one after costs. Counting fees into the basis is the difference between a story and a result.