Right now, most platforms only show you the change in share price compared to your cost basis. That works okay for pure growth stocks. For those of us who actually live off dividends, it’s borderline useless.

Take $FDUS as a perfect example. On one of our platforms it shows as a loss based on current market value. We’ve held it for over five years. Once you factor in the dividends received and reinvested during that period, the picture changes dramatically — and it suddenly looks like a very solid holding.

This is exactly the kind of information that matters when deciding whether to keep, add to, or sell a position. Yet I still have to calculate it manually in a spreadsheet.

I only started tracking total return properly in 2025, so I don’t have full historical data. But even looking at the last 18 months, the difference between “what the platform shows” and “actual performance” is significant.

Come on brokers and platforms — give dividend investors a proper total return view. It’s not rocket science.