Broker guides

Robinhood export guide: your account activity as a file

Robinhood's account activity report is a CSV with every trade, dividend, deposit and fee in your account, each with a date. It sits under Account, then Statements & History, then Reports and statements, and you generate it for a range you choose.

This guide covers how to generate the report, how to read the Trans Code column and the amounts in parentheses, and what the file makes possible that the app does not show.

How to generate the report

Go to Account, then Statements & History, then Reports and statements, then Reports.
Click Generate new report.
Pick the full range since you opened the account.
Wait a few minutes, then download the CSV.
Upload it to BullBenchmark.

Amounts like ($900.00) mean minus 900. Leave the file as it was delivered and a tool reads the signs correctly.

What the report is for

Robinhood's interface is built for the moment, with today's price, today's move and a line chart. It is not built for bookkeeping.

If you want to know what you paid for a position across a dozen partial buys, what your dividends added up to last year, or whether your stock picking beat a plain index fund, the app does not show any of it.

The activity report is the complete record, with every trade, every dividend, every deposit and every fee, and a date on each. Those dated events are the raw material for a cost basis per holding, a time-weighted return you can compare with a benchmark, and a dividend history that adds up to a total.

The report is also your own record, useful at tax time and necessary if you ever move brokers. The case for measuring against an index at all is made in why benchmark your portfolio. The report is how you get the data to do it.

Why the full range matters

A report that starts after your first trade produces positions with no purchase behind them, and every downstream number (cost basis, realized gains, returns) inherits the hole. Generating the report takes the same effort whatever range you pick, so pick all of it.

The file then covers everything from your first deposit onward, and there is no penalty for asking for more than you need.

What the Trans Code column means

The report packs every event into one column of short codes. These are the ones that matter.

Buy / Sell are your trades, with quantity and price.
CDIV is a cash dividend received.
ACH is a deposit or withdrawal from your bank.
SLIP is stock lending income.
GOLD is your Robinhood Gold subscription fee.

Each code plays a different role in your bookkeeping. Buys and sells rebuild your positions and cost basis. CDIV rows are your dividend income, and where the app shows only a history list, the rows let you total that income by year or by holding.

ACH rows mark when money entered and left the account, which is what a return calculation is anchored to. A fair comparison with the market has to account for when your cash arrived, not only how much of it there was.

SLIP and GOLD rows record income and costs that rarely make it into anyone's mental accounting, but belong in the ledger.

Reading the amounts

Amounts come wrapped in dollar signs and parentheses. "($900.00)" means minus 900 dollars. This is accounting notation, and it is easy to misread in Excel.

A spreadsheet that treats "($900.00)" as text rather than as negative nine hundred will sum a column of them to zero, and a hand-built tracker inherits the error. This is one of several reasons to leave the file as it is. Reformat the amounts by hand and it is easy to flip a sign or drop a row.

The report is machine-readable as delivered. Let the machine read it, and keep the original file unedited as your source of record.

What the report does not tell you

The first thing the app does not tell you is whether you are beating the market. Robinhood shows your portfolio line against nothing. A green +32% looks good until you notice that the S&P 500 did +41% over the same period, a comparison the app does not show.

Dividend tracking is thin in the same way. You get a history list, but no yearly totals, no forward projection and no yield on cost.

The report itself contains every event needed to compute a time-weighted return. That figure, unlike the app's percentage, strips out the effect of when you happened to deposit money and isolates how your choices performed. The distinction is worth understanding once, and time-weighted vs money-weighted return walks through it.

On the dividend side, the CDIV rows support everything the app omits, from annual totals and per-holding income to growth over time. That is the gap between a list and a ledger, covered further in dividend tracking: spreadsheet vs tool.

What to check after exporting

Before you trust anything computed from the file, give it a short audit.

Confirm that the earliest rows correspond to your first deposit and first trade, not to a truncated range.
Net the buys and sells for a holding or two and check that the result matches your current position in the app.
Scan for CDIV rows in months you know you were paid a dividend.
Check that the ACH rows account for every deposit you remember making. A missing deposit inflates your apparent return, which is the kind of error few people check.

If something is absent, generate the report again with the full range before assuming anything else. The record behind the report is complete. The range selection is where things usually go wrong.

Frequently asked questions

Is the report the same as my monthly statements? No. Statements are formatted documents for reading. The report is a machine-readable CSV of your raw activity, and for tracking you want the report.

What does "($900.00)" mean? Minus 900 dollars. Parentheses are accounting notation for negative amounts. Money out is wrapped in parentheses, money in is not.

Do fractional shares show up correctly? Yes, trades record the fractional quantity. Do not let a spreadsheet round the decimals, because those digits are your position.

Does uploading the file give a tracker access to my Robinhood account? No. A file-based tracker sees the history you exported and nothing else, with no login, no trading access and no live connection. That separation is explained in portfolio tracking without broker login.

How often should I generate a new report? Whenever you want current numbers. Each report contains your full selected history, so a fresh one always supersedes the last. Monthly is a common rhythm for buy-and-hold investors. If you trade often, export as often as you want the dashboard to keep up.

I also have an account at another broker. Can the files be combined? Yes. Your performance is that of all your accounts together, not of one app's part of it. Export from each broker and let one tool merge the histories. See tracking multiple brokers in one dashboard for how that works.

Using the file

Upload the report to BullBenchmark and it is parsed automatically, with trades, dividends and deposits included. You get the benchmark comparison Robinhood does not show, in dollars or in any currency you prefer.

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.