Multi-broker

How to track multiple brokers in one dashboard

DeGiro for cheap ETF orders, IBKR for options and US market access, and an app with a free share that you never closed. Two or three brokers is a normal way to invest now, and it means that no single screen shows your total portfolio.

Nobody plans this. Brokers compete on niches, and people open an account where each broker is strongest. Each decision is sensible on its own. The consequence is that your allocation, your total exposure and your total return exist nowhere.

This article covers what that gap costs, why a master spreadsheet fails as the fix, what a proper merge involves, and what the merged view changes.

How a portfolio ends up at three brokers

The multi-broker portfolio is the usual outcome of shopping around. You started somewhere, a second platform did one thing better or cheaper, and a promotion handed you a free share on a third. Closing an account is paperwork with no deadline, so accounts stay open with a position or two in them.

Add a workplace scheme or an old account at a traditional bank, and four platforms is not unusual.

What fragmentation costs you

Each app shows its own slice with its own arithmetic. Your total asset allocation, your total tech exposure, your total US concentration and your cash position exist nowhere. Your dividends arrive in three interfaces.

A question like whether you beat the market overall requires merging numbers that use different return definitions and different currencies. Few people do that by hand, so decisions get made per app instead of per portfolio.

The return definitions differ more than they appear to. One app reports a simple gain on cost. Another reports a time-weighted figure. A third shows something it does not explain. These are different quantities that answer different questions, and averaging them in your head produces a number that answers none of them.

The concentration you most need to see, the same mega-cap stocks accumulating across three accounts through different funds, is the one thing a per-app view cannot show.

Why the master spreadsheet fails

The master spreadsheet works for about one quarter. Different export formats, different currencies, fractional shares from one broker and position IDs from another mean that you become the integration layer. When life gets busy, the sheet stops being updated.

The life cycle is the same for most people who build one. In the first weekend the columns are designed, the formulas written, a tab per broker, and everything reconciles to the cent.

In the second month one broker changes its export column order and the paste breaks. In the third month a dividend arrives in dollars and the currency handling turns out to be missing.

By the fourth month, updating the sheet is a chore that loses to everything else. The numbers in it drift away from your accounts, and you still half-trust them. The same pattern is described for dividends in spreadsheet versus tool for dividend tracking.

What a proper merge involves

Four things have to happen when broker exports are combined.

One base currency. Everything converts to one base currency at historical rates. That keeps a dollar purchase from 2022 from being repriced at today's exchange rate, the core rule of multi-currency tracking.
One cost-basis method. The same cost-basis method applies everywhere, so that a 12% gain means the same calculation whether the position sits at DeGiro or at IBKR.
One dividend calendar. Dividends from all sources land in one calendar, which turns three streams of notifications into one visible stream with a total.
One combined cash-flow history for the benchmark. To know whether you beat the index, the simulation has to buy the index with every deposit you ever made, on the date you made it, regardless of which platform received the money.

Why not consolidate at one broker?

Consolidating at one broker removes the problem for some people. The forces that created the spread do not disappear, though. No single broker is best at everything, transfers between platforms can be slow or costly, and some accounts, such as a workplace scheme or a pension wrapper, cannot move at all.

Platform outages also happen, and not depending on a single login has a value of its own.

For most investors, multiple accounts are a lasting fact. The question is then how to keep the information in one place while the accounts stay separate.

A middle path is to close the accounts that no longer serve a purpose, such as the dormant app with a single free share, and to merge the view of what remains. Either way the tracking question is the same.

Even a portfolio that ends up at one broker carries years of history from the others, and that history is what your long-term return is made of. Merged once, it is preserved.

What the merged view changes

The first merged view of a multi-broker portfolio usually contains surprises. The allocation comes first: the tech concentration that three separate apps each showed as moderate turns out to be most of the portfolio when combined. Then the forgotten positions appear, such as the free share or the leftover fund from a strategy abandoned in 2023.

Then the questions that need the combined portfolio become answerable: total return across everything, income across everything, and whether the combined portfolio beats the S&P 500. Decisions are then made about the portfolio you own rather than about the slice one app displays. Rebalancing in particular only means anything at the combined level.

One stream of events

BullBenchmark treats every broker export, from DeGiro, IBKR, Trading 212, Robinhood, eToro or any CSV via column mapping, as one stream of events. You upload each broker's file and get one portfolio, with one allocation, one dividend calendar and one benchmark verdict. Your accounts stay where they are, and the overview becomes one dashboard.

There are no logins, no linked accounts and no aggregator holding your credentials, only the export files each broker already produces, uploaded when you want to update. The reasons for that design are in why we'll never ask for your broker login. Once a month, one file per broker, and the merging is no longer done by hand.

The setup cost is small: find each broker's export screen once. After that the routine is a few downloads and uploads per month, and the per-broker guides on this blog cover the clicks for each platform. What you get is one set of books for all your accounts, kept current with a few minutes of work per month.

In short

With two or three brokers, no single app shows your total allocation, your total income or your total return.
A master spreadsheet makes you the integration layer, and it stops being updated within a few months.
A proper merge needs one base currency at historical rates, one cost-basis method, one dividend calendar and one combined cash-flow history for the benchmark.
Consolidating accounts is a separate decision from merging the information. The history from the other brokers stays part of your long-term return either way.

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.