How on earth do i figure out if my investment isa performance is good, bad or appalling.

[Slapdashsuitcase]

I am struggling to find a way to know if my isa is going OK. I have a life time isa for pension saving alongside my dB pension.
Is there a website that let's you easily compare over time, rather than performance in the last year?
I opened in March 2018 and have invested the 4000 plus 1000 government top up every tax year since. It's a high risk social and environmental weighted managed portfolio.
How do I compare it with other isas for that whole time period, taking into account the weirdness of covid.
I have contributed approximately 35000 , received approx 5400 growth and paid approx 940 fees.
How do I figure out if this is good. I think this is equivalent to 5% interest- that doesn't sound amazing but covid has interrupted things.
On a side note I am getting dubious about environmental weighting and dodgy things with carbon credits.
So should I stick or twist?

Are the funds named specifically?
If they are you can look them up on Morning Star or other financial sites and compare them with the other funds in their group category.
ESG funds are generally dogs and underperform, they just haven’t got the range of non ESG.
It looks like you need the ‘bad’ stuff to actually make any money.
I had the misfortune of investing £25k in an ESG fund in 2021, it dropped 25% within a week of purchase 🙄 and it only recovered 10% in a year, I cut my losses and invested in an normal fund instead and I’ve only got £600 to go to break even.

A quick scan says ESG funds have performed round about the 14% mark over the last 5 years, so under 3% a year.
If you’ve managed 5%, that’s actually ok.
Obviously long term, it’s going to create a drag, 7-8% is the average.

We’ve also had 4 ‘once in a lifetime’ events in the last 5 years that have created the chaos.

@BorgQueen I feel your pain! I invested a similar amount in various different funds at the 2021 peak and it all crashed very soon afterwards and I was down a similar amount to you. I buried my head in the sand and didn't want to look at my account for ages.

Finally looked at it the other day and sold some of the ones which hadn't gone down and invested in a normal fund as you say, a bog standard global passive index. I'm not sure what to do with the losers. They're all down in varying amounts from a few percent to 50%.

Some are individual stocks which are down but paying fairly good dividends which kind of helps to make up the capital loss I think.

The portfolio if you can call it that, dog's dinner would be more accurate, is a mess and I don't know what to do.

I initially invested £25k. Withdrew £5k without crystallising any losses. And am now left with £15k. Am tempted to sell and use the money to pay a chunk off my mortgage which would equate to a 5.18% return.

I'd suggest that whatever funds you are invested in, performance should be tracked either against a standard global tracker fund (assuming you are 100% in equities), or, if you have some bonds in there, you could use one of the Vanguard Lifestrategy funds as your benchmark. There are variants with equities making up 20%, 40%, 60% and 80%. I tend to compare my investment performance against both the 40% and 60% funds, as I'm about 50% invested in equities.

You could also pick a few fund managers to compare yourself against. If you can see that the likes of Nick Train, Terry Smith, or the team at Baillie Gifford (for example) have struggled over a given period, then you may not feel so bad!

Generally though, don't worry too much about performance over short timeframes, unless your funds compare poorly against your chosen benchmark for more than a year or two. If you keep investing over a long period, you are likely to outperform cash investments.

I share your scepticism on ESG focused investments and would be tempted to ditch them. Largely it's a marketing gimmick, in my view. A standard global tracker will cost you less in fees, and potentially boost performance over the long term. The other advantage is that you won't have to worry about tracking performance, since you will be getting the average market return.

You can get over 5% in a Short term money market fund ( I’ve just used the cash pot in my Sipp to buy it) not completely risk free but near enough.
If paying down your mortgage beats that then it’s a no brainer.
The only reason we haven’t paid off our mortgage is that it’s fixed at 1.1% ( seems incredible now) until 2026, at which point we’ll pay the remaining £15k off.
I’m getting 5.75% in a fixed ISA so all’s good.
The S+S ISA that held the dog fund, which I changed to an HSBC global strategy fund has grown 7% this last few months.

@BorgQueen I have some mm funds in my SIPP which I am gradually investing into a global index.

The dogs are in my ISA. We had a great mortgage, base rate tracker +0.18% throughout the entire period of low interest rates. Obviously a lot higher now. We don't have much left to pay off, should be done by next year.

Thanks for all the advice. I have 6 years left on a 2.2 fix mortgage. I've put 15k into 6 percent 1 year and 3 year bonds and just moved my easy access savings to a 5 percent account. I think that's what has made me question my lisa performace

@BorgQueen
4 events?
What are they? Covid obviously, cost of living? Credit crisis 2007 what else?

It's intriguing isn't it - COVID and Brexit are both true "once in a lifetime" events in the last 5 years.

Credit crunch was now 15 years ago and cost of living crises happen more often than a lifetime - the 1970s for example.