Robinhood export guide: your account activity as a file

Robinhood would prefer you never leave the app. Your data can, though, and this guide covers how to get it out, how to read what comes back, and what the file makes possible that the app doesn't.

Why pull the report at all

Robinhood's interface is built for the moment: today's price, today's move, a line chart with a reassuring glow. What it is not built for is bookkeeping. If you want to know what you actually paid for a position across a dozen partial buys, what your dividends added up to last year, or whether your stock picking has earned its keep against a plain index fund, the app will not volunteer any of it.

The activity report is the complete record: every trade, every dividend, every deposit, every fee, with dates attached. Those dated events are the raw material for the numbers that matter — cost basis for each holding, a time-weighted return you can honestly compare to a benchmark, and a dividend history that adds up to something. It is also simply your record, useful at tax time and indispensable 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.

Getting the report

Account → Statements & History → Reports and statements → Reports → Generate new report. Pick the full range since you opened the account. A few minutes later you can download a CSV.

The full range matters more than it seems. 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 covers everything from your first deposit onward, and there is no penalty for asking for more than you need.

Decoding Trans Code

The report packs every event into one column of terse codes. The ones that matter:

• Buy / Sell: your trades, with quantity and price
• CDIV: cash dividend received
• ACH: deposit or withdrawal from your bank
• SLIP: stock lending income
• GOLD: 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 — the app shows you a history list, but the rows are what let you total it by year or by holding. ACH rows mark when money entered and left the account, which is what a proper return calculation is anchored to: a fair comparison against the market has to account for when your cash showed up, not just how much of it there was. And rows like SLIP and GOLD are the quiet ledger of income and costs that never make it into anyone's mental accounting, but belong in the real one.

Reading the amounts

Amounts come wrapped in dollar signs and parentheses, "($900.00)" means minus 900 dollars. Accounting notation in a consumer app; charming, but easy to misread in Excel.

Misread is the operative word. A spreadsheet that treats "($900.00)" as text rather than as negative nine hundred will happily sum a column of them to zero, and a hand-built tracker inherits the error. This is one of several reasons to resist tidying the file by hand: reformat the amounts, and it is remarkably 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.

The things the report won't tell you

Whether you're beating the market, for one. Robinhood shows your portfolio line against nothing. A green +32% feels great until you notice the S&P 500 did +41% over the same stretch, a comparison the app has no interest in showing you.

Dividend tracking is similarly thin: you get a history list, but no yearly totals, no forward projection, no yield-on-cost.

None of this is an accident of engineering; a brokerage app's job is to keep you trading, and an index comparison is the sort of thing that makes people trade less. The report itself is neutral, though. It contains every event needed to compute a time-weighted return, and that figure — unlike the app's cheerful percentage — strips out the effect of when you happened to deposit money and isolates how your choices performed. The distinction is worth understanding once; time-weighted vs money-weighted return walks through it. On the dividend side, the CDIV rows support everything the app omits: annual totals, per-holding income, growth over time — the gap between a list and a ledger, covered further in dividend tracking: spreadsheet vs tool.

What to check after exporting

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

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

If something is absent, regenerate the report with the full range before assuming anything more sinister. 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. 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 actual fractional quantity. Just don't let a spreadsheet round the decimals — those digits are your real 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 — no login, no trading access, no live connection. That separation is the point: see portfolio tracking without broker login.

How often should I regenerate the report? Whenever you want current numbers. Each report contains your full selected history, so a fresh one always supersedes the last. Monthly is a sensible rhythm for most 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, and they should be. Your real performance is the whole portfolio, not one app's slice of it. Export from each broker and let one tool merge the histories; see tracking multiple brokers in one dashboard for how that works in practice.

Using the file

Upload the report to BullBenchmark and it's parsed automatically, trades, dividends, deposits, the works. You get the benchmark comparison Robinhood doesn't show, in dollars or any currency you prefer. The whole point of an export is seeing your money without the app's framing around it.

The first week of BullBenchmark is free, no card, upload the export you just downloaded and see where you stand.

Related: Am I beating the S&P 500? · Realized vs unrealized gains