Broker guides

BUX export guide: getting your full history out of the app

BUX is an Amsterdam-based app broker with customers in the Netherlands and Germany. Buying takes seconds in the app. Getting a complete transaction history back out takes a few more steps, because the history lives in the documents section rather than behind an export button.

This guide covers where to find your history, what to check in the file, and the three details of an app broker's export that cause most errors in a portfolio tracker.

How to get your history out of BUX

Open your profile or account section in the app and look for documents, statements or reports.
Prefer a machine-readable export (CSV or Excel) if one is offered. Statements as PDF are a record, not data.
Cover your whole history, not the current year. If monthly statements are all you get, collect every month.
Check that fractional amounts and dividends are in whatever you download.
Upload the file to BullBenchmark. An unfamiliar layout is mapped once and recognized after that.

App layouts change often, so this guide does not print an exact click path. Look for the words documents, statements or reports in the version installed on your phone.

What app brokers show, and what they leave to the export

An app broker gives you low costs, fractional shares and an interface that does not assume you read annual reports. What it does not give you is reporting. The screen shows what you hold and a line that goes up and down. It does not show a time-weighted return, it does not compare you with an index on equal terms, and it rarely shows a dividend history in one view.

That is a product decision, not a flaw. It does mean that the numbers you need to measure your own result live in the export rather than on the screen, and that getting them out is worth ten minutes once a month.

Where your history lives

Look in the profile or account area for a documents section. Expect periodic account statements, confirmations of individual orders, and any yearly tax paperwork the broker produces for your country. If a transaction export in CSV or Excel form is offered anywhere, take that over everything else. A spreadsheet file can be recalculated; a PDF can only be read.

If you have used more than one product under the BUX brand over the years, treat each one as a separate account with its own history, and export both. Merging two products from memory is one of the most common causes of a wrong personal ledger.

Take the whole period. A history that starts halfway leaves positions with no origin and sales with no matching purchase, and the resulting cost basis is wrong without any error showing on screen.

Fractions, small orders and dividends

Three details of an app broker's file cause most problems in a tracker.

Fractional shares. A holding of 2.4137 shares is normal, and every decimal matters. Round it in a spreadsheet and your position stops matching your account while your numbers still look plausible.

Many small orders. If you buy monthly, your file is long. For measurement that is useful: every purchase is a dated cash flow, and a fair index comparison needs those dates, because the benchmark is the same money invested in an index tracker on the same days.

Dividends in a separate place. Check that dividend credits, and any tax withheld from them, are in what you downloaded. A history that has your purchases but not your income understates your return by the amount of the dividends. The dates that matter, and why a payment sometimes arrives weeks after the announcement, are covered in the ex-dividend date explained.

Tax questions start in the export

A broker screen shows what you hold today, not what you held on a date two years ago. That figure is reconstructed from the transaction history. Doing it from statements fifteen months later is a bookkeeping question rather than a market question.

Tax charged on your holdings can also appear in the export as money leaving the account in a year in which you sold nothing. That is a cash flow, not a fall in the value of what you hold, and it says nothing about your performance.

This page describes what is in the file and is not tax advice. Both cases come down to the same thing: a complete transaction history is the raw material from which these figures can be derived later, and a screenshot of a balance is not.

What to check before you trust the numbers

Does the oldest entry reach back to your first order?
If you collected monthly statements, is any month missing?
Do purchases minus sales reproduce today's holdings, fractions included?
Are dividends present for the months you know you were paid?
Do deposits and withdrawals add up to roughly the money you moved?

If a check fails, the file is usually right and the date range or the document type is usually wrong. Export again before drawing conclusions.

From export to answer

Once the history is in one place, the questions the app never answered become answerable. What is your time-weighted return over the period you have been investing? What would the same deposits, on the same dates, have become in an index tracker? How much of your result came from the shares and how much from the euro-dollar rate? What did your dividends add?

BullBenchmark answers those questions from the file itself, without a broker login, with your history rebuilt and compared with the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 in your own currency. The live demo shows the same dashboard on a sample portfolio, if you would rather see it before uploading anything of your own.

BullBenchmark reads the transaction export from your broker and shows your return next to the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100, fed with the same deposits on the same dates, in your own currency. The first two weeks are free and no card is needed.