Cost Basis in Retirement Accounts Irrelevant?
One thing to keep in mind is that with Roth accounts, there are different withdrawal considerations based on your contributions. For example, you can withdraw Roth IRA contributions whenever you want in the future.  However this really has nothing to do with your cost basis and purely to do with the contribution amount vs balance. Cost basis is irrelevant because the entire distribution is taxed as ordinary income even if the custodian distributes stock or mutual fund shares to you. Such distributions save you the brokerage fees that you would incur had you taken a cash distribution and promptly bought the shares outside the retirement account for yourself but they have no effect on the tax treatment of the distribution: the market value of the shares distributed to you is taxed as ordinary income, and your basis in the newly acquired shares outside the retirement account is the market value of the shares, all prices being as of the date of the distribution.
"My two cents: I am a pension actuary and see the performance of funds on a daily basis. Is it normal to see down years? Yes, absolutely. It's a function of the directional bias of how the portfolio is invested. In the case of a 401(k) that almost always mean a positive directional bias (being long). Now, in your case I see two issues: The amount of drawdown over one year. It is atypical to have a 14% loss in a little over a year. Given the market conditions, this means that you nearly experienced the entire drawdown of the SP500 (which your portfolio is highly correlated to) and you have no protection from the downside. The use of so-called ""target-date funds"". Their very implication makes no sense. Essentially, they try to generate a particular return over the elapsed time until retirement. The issue is that the market is by all statistical accounts random with positive drift (it can be expected to move up in the long term). This positive drift is due to the fact that people should be paid to take on risk. So if you need the money 20 years from now, what's the big deal? Well, the issue is that no one, and I repeat, no one, knows when the market will experience long down moves. So you happily experience positive drift for 20 years and your money grows to a decent size. Then, right before you retire, the market shaves 20%+ of your investments. Will you recoup these damages? Most likely yes. But will that be in the timeframe you need? The market doesn't care if you need money or not. So, here is my advice if you are comfortable taking control of your money. See if you can roll your money into an IRA (some 401(k) plans will permit this) or, if you contribute less that the 401(k) contribution limit you make want to just contribute to an IRA (be mindful of the annual limits). In this case, you can set up a self-directed account. Here you will have the flexibility to diversify and take action as necessary. And by diversify, I don't mean that ""buy lots of different stuff"" garbage, I mean focus on uncorrelated assets. You can get by on a handful of ETFs (SPY, TLT, QQQ, ect.). These all have liquid options available. Once you build a base, you can lower basis by writing covered calls against these positions. This is allowed in almost all IRA accounts. In my opinion, and I see this far too often, your potential and drive to take control of your assets is far superior than the so called ""professionals or advisors"". They will 99% of the time stick you in a target date fund and hope that they make their basis points on your money and retire before you do. Not saying everyone is unethical, but its hard to care about your money more than you will." "For any accounts where you have a wish to keep track of dividends, gains and losses, etc., you will have to set up a an account to hold the separately listed securities.  It looks like you already know how to do this.  Here the trading accounts will help you, especially if you have Finance:Quote set up (to pull security prices from the internet). For the actively-managed accounts, you can just create each managed account and NOT fill it with the separate securities.  You can record the changes in that account in summary each month/year as you prefer. So, you might set up your chart of accounts to include these assets: And this income: The actively-managed accounts will each get set up as Type ""Stock.""  You will create one fake security for each account, which will get your unrealized gains/losses on active accounts showing up in your trading accounts.  The fake securities will NOT be pulling prices from the internet.  Go to     Tools -> Securities Editor -> Add and type in a name such as ""Merrill Lynch Brokerage,"" a symbol such as ""ML1,"" and in the ""Type"" field input something like ""Actively Managed."" In your self-managed accounts, you will record dividends and sales as they occur, and your securities will be set to get quotes online.  You can follow the general GnuCash guides for this.   In your too-many-transactions actively traded accounts, maybe once a month you will gather up your statements and enter the activity in summary to tie the changes in cost basis.  I would suggest making each fake ""share"" equal $1, so if you have a $505 dividend, you buy 505 ""shares"" with it.  So, you might have these transactions for your brokerage account with Merrill Lynch (for example): When you have finished making your period-end summary entries for all the actively-managed accounts, double-check that the share balances of your actively-managed accounts match the cost basis amounts on your statements.  Remember that each fake ""share"" is worth $1 when you enter it.  Once the cost basis is tied, you can go into the price editor (Tools -> Price Editor) and enter a new ""price"" as of the period-end date for each actively-managed account.  The price will be ""Value of Active Acct at Period-End/Cost of Active Acct at Period-End.""  So, if your account was worth $1908 but had a cost basis of $505 on Jan. 31, you would type ""1908/505"" in the price field and Jan. 31, 2017 in the date field. When you run your reports, you will want to choose the price source as ""Nearest in Time"" so that GnuCash grabs the correct quotes. This should make your actively-managed accounts have the correct activity in summary in your GnuCash income accounts and let them work well with the Trading Accounts feature." "P/E is price to earnings, or the price of the company divided by annual earnings. Earnings, as reported, are reported on accrual basis. Accrual basis accounting is...without going too deep, like taking a timeline, chopping it up and throwing different bits and pieces of every year into different piles.  Costs from 2008 might show up in 2011, or the company might take costs in 2011 that aren't necessarily costs until 2012.  Examples would include one-time charges for specific investments, like new shipping centers, servers for their hosting services, etc.    Free cash flow is the amount of cash Amazon is generating from its operations. Free cash flow is almost always different from earnings because it's the amount of Earnings + adjustments for non-cash activities - capital expenditures (long-term investments.)  Earnings is one thing.  Cash generation is a completely different animal.  There are plenty of companies that ""earn"" billions, but only have a few hundred million in cash to show for it because their earnings have to be reinvested into new stuff to grow/maintain the business.  To have a free cash flow yield of 2.5% is to have a company valued at $40 for each $1 of free cash flow that the company generates each year.  $1/$40 = 2.5%.  SGA = Selling, General, &amp; Administrative expenses.  These are the costs of running the company - paying salaries, advertising, etc.  This cost is second only to COGS, which is Cost of Goods Sold.    Currently, Amazon pays $.774 for every $1 product it sells.  Its operations add another ~$.20 to that total.  After taxes, Amazon keeps about 2 cents of every dollar's worth of product it sells.  This 2 cents is Amazon's net margin of 2%.  Net margin is (net income)/(sales).  If Amazon earned $3 for every $100 in sales it would have a net margin of 3%.     Let me know if this makes no sense.  If there's anything in particular that is especially confusing, definitely reply and I'll better clarify on specific items.  Fire away with any questions, also.  I love to discuss finance and accounting." The last column in the source data is volume (the number of stocks that was exchanged during the day), and it also has a value of zero for that day, meaning that nobody bought or sold the stocks on that day. And since the prices are prices of transactions (the first and the last one on a particular day, and the ones with the highest/lowest price), the prices cannot be established, and are irrelevant as there was not a single transaction on that day. Only the close price is assumed equal to its previous day counterpart because this is the most important value serving as a basis to determine the daily price change (and we assume no change in this case). Continuous-line charts also use this single value. Bar and candle charts usually display a blank space for a day where no trade occurred. Index funds, like IBB, generally lack active management, which equates to lower expenses. This is simply because the target index, the NASDAQ Biotechnology Index in the case of IBB, is composed of known quantities. This means there won't be stock pickers or analysts constantly swapping holdings, increasing the turnover rate of the portfolio and increasing capital gains; costs that are offset by higher expense ratios in more actively managed funds. "Not to state the obvious, but whenever an investment is being made, the ""nuts and bolts"" is your return on investment.  Analyzing the rate of return on an investment is the primary factor in any decision.  Ideally, once the actual mechanics of investment and side ""benefits"" are factored out, the goal is to be able to analyze the pure financial return. Usually the biggest problem faced in analyzing various investments is comparing the Present Value of an investment to a series of payments that may be made or received in the future.  When considering the purchase of a large equity, for example, you might be looking at what series of payments are required to purchase the asset.  You can also reverse this and ask, ""What amount of money is equivalent to this series of payments?"" Ultimately, the Present Value of an Annuity is the way to make these comparisons equal.   Fundamentally, the Present Value of an annuity is an amount of money that should, in theory, be equivalent to a series of payments.  There is, for example, technically no difference between $1064.94 today and $100 a month for a year, at an interest rate of 1% per month.  Grant you, most people would be happier with the money now, but that is what interest does - it compensates you for waiting on your money.   You can fire up a spreadsheet and calculate the Present Value as long as you have the monthly payment, interest rate, and number of periods.  Alternatively, you can calculate any one of those missing four variables - and the key is usually to understand what that rate would be in order to compare the investments. Finally, the taxable implication is really just an adjustment to the rate of return. Imagine the following three scenarios: (Obviously the rates are fictional - the goal is to show they are the same). Scenarios 1 & 2 are really just two sides of the same coin.  Using the Future Value formula in Excel = FV(0.5%, 12, -100), you get $1233.56.  In scenario 1, you would have $1233.56 in your bank account.  In scenario 2, your bank would have $1233.56 from you, and you would have $100 less debt per month.  They are equivalent transactions.   Scenario 3 is really just a variation on scenario 2, localized to the United States.  Because the interest is tax deductible, however, the rate of 6% isn't really accurate.  Assuming you had a 25% tax bracket, you'd actually be getting back one quarter of your interest.  Put another way, 7.5% mortgage interest costs you as much as 6% credit card debt. This is how you compare apples and organges - just turn everything into an annuity or a lump sum, using Present Value calculations.   Finally, quick rule of thumb - if you owe taxes in both Canada and the US, your Canadian taxes are probably higher than your American ones.  As such, any tax incentives will be concomitantly higher.  If you only can only use Canadian tax incentives, then look to those incentives, other things being equal." It looks like an improvement to me, if for no other reason than lowering the expenses. But if you are around 35 years away from retirement you could consider eliminating all bond funds for now. They will pay better in a few years. And the stock market(s) will definitely go up more than bonds over the next 35 years. I don't know that I can answer the question fully, but 2 points. The percent that represent capital gains certainly can't exceed 100. Did you mean 50% but the 500% is a typo?  More important, funds held in retirement accounts have no issue with this, Cap Gains are meaningless within tax deferred accounts. I don't know the ratio of stocks held in these accounts vs outside, just that the 2011 year end total retirement account worth was $17 trillion. (That's 12 zeros) This strikes me as a high ratio, although more numbers digging is in order.