Broker guides

Trade Republic export guide: getting your history out of the app

Trade Republic is where many German investors placed their first order, and the app is built for buying rather than for bookkeeping. It shows a chart and a position list. A complete, machine-readable record of everything that happened in your account is harder to find.

That record lives in the documents area of the app, as statements, order confirmations and yearly tax documents. This guide covers where to look, which format to prefer, what a tracker needs from the file, what savings plans and tax lines do to it, and what to check before you trust the numbers.

How to get your history out of Trade Republic

Open the documents area from your profile. It holds statements, order confirmations and the yearly tax documents.
Look for a machine-readable export (CSV or Excel) before you settle for a stack of PDFs. What is offered differs per app version.
Take the full period, from before your first order until today, not the current year.
If you invest through a savings plan, check that every single execution is in the file, not only the plan itself.
Upload what you have to BullBenchmark. An unfamiliar column layout is mapped once and recognized after that.

This guide does not print an exact menu path. Trade Republic reworks its app regularly, so a printed click path would go out of date. Look for the words documents, statements or reports in the version you have in front of you.

What a tracker needs from the file

It helps to know what you are looking for before you open the documents area. Four kinds of record carry almost all of the information in a portfolio. A file that is missing one of them produces answers that look plausible and are wrong.

Cash flows with their dates. Every deposit into the account and every withdrawal out of it. Money that arrived in March did not go through the same market as money that arrived in November, so a fair benchmark replays your deposits on the days they happened. The reasoning is explained in time-weighted vs money-weighted return.

Trades with prices and costs. What you bought, and what it cost you in total, including order fees and any currency conversion. A cost basis built on the pre-fee amount overstates your return by the fee on every trade. Over a few hundred savings plan executions that adds up.

Dividends, gross and net. The payment, and whatever was withheld from it before it reached your cash balance. If your history only has the net amount, it understates what your holdings generated by the amount withheld.

Exchange rates. If you hold American shares from a euro account, part of your result is the dollar. Either the file records the rate used per transaction, or the rate has to be reconstructed from the transaction date. Both work. Using today's rate for an old transaction does not.

Where Trade Republic keeps your documents

Trade Republic collects all documents in one place, a documents or reports section that you reach from your profile. Expect periodic account statements, a confirmation per executed order, and the tax paperwork that a German broker produces once a year for its customers.

The exact route, the naming and the formats on offer have changed several times and differ between app versions and markets. Open the documents area, read the list of what is available to you, and pick the item that covers your complete account history rather than one month or one order.

If your version offers a transaction export as a CSV or a spreadsheet file, that is the one you want. If it only offers PDF statements, the next section explains what that means for a tracker.

Why a PDF statement is not an export

A PDF statement shows a table on a page. A CSV file contains the table as rows and columns. Everything a tracker calculates, cost basis, time-weighted return, dividend totals and the benchmark replay, is arithmetic over rows. A PDF has a layout but no rows, so a tool that reads a PDF has to guess where each column starts.

BullBenchmark reads CSV and XLSX exports and has a column mapper for layouts it has not seen before. You point out which column holds the date and which holds the amount, and the format is recognized from then on. It cannot add structure that the file never had, so a PDF on its own is not enough.

If your app only offers PDFs, check whether a web login or a newer app version offers a machine-readable export. Keep every PDF in any case, because they are your record and a broker's document archive is not kept forever.

If you are unsure whether the file you have can be read, ask us at support@bullbenchmark.com before spending an evening on it.

What savings plans do to the file

A typical Trade Republic history consists of several hundred small savings plan executions, often in fractional shares, rather than a few dozen trades. That has two consequences.

First, the fractions matter. A holding of 4.8271 shares is normal. Rounding it to two decimals in a spreadsheet changes your position and creates small gains and losses that never happened. Keep every decimal in whatever you do with the file.

Second, each execution is a cash flow with its own date, and for measurement that is useful. A monthly plan is a clean input for a benchmark comparison, because a simulated index portfolio that received your deposits on the same dates is easy to construct.

The simulated portfolio also invests monthly, so the comparison isolates your selection. It shows whether your holdings did better than an index tracker bought with the same money on the same days.

How tax lines appear in the file

Tax is often settled at source on realized gains and on distributions, and tax on fund holdings can be taken from your cash balance in a year in which you sold nothing. In your export these appear as money leaving the account, which is what they are.

A tax debit reduces your cash, not the return of the investments you hold. A tracker that treats it as a withdrawal is doing the right thing. A tracker that treats it as a loss on your portfolio is not. This page describes how the bookkeeping works and is not tax advice.

What to check before you trust the numbers

These five checks take about two minutes.

Does the oldest row in the file reach back to your first order, or only to the start of the period you selected?
Do the shares implied by all buys minus all sells match what the app shows you today, fractions included?
Are the months you know you were paid a dividend present, with the withheld amounts next to them?
Do the deposits add up to roughly the money you remember transferring in?
Did a share split or a fund merger happen in a holding you own, and is it in the file? Corporate actions are a common cause of a share count that drifts without any error showing on screen.

If something is missing, export again with a wider date range before concluding that the file or the tracker is wrong. In practice the record at the broker is complete and the export settings are where things go wrong.

Frequently asked questions

Does BullBenchmark need your Trade Republic login? No. Nothing here involves credentials or account linking. You export a file and upload it. The reasoning is in why we will never ask for your broker login.

How often should you export? Monthly is enough for a savings plan portfolio. Uploading overlapping history changes nothing, because rows that are already known are recognized and skipped.

Can you combine it with another broker? Yes. A portfolio split across two apps has no total anywhere until both files sit in the same ledger, which is the subject of tracking multiple brokers in one dashboard.

Is a German export a problem? No. Column names and booking labels are consistent within a broker, and a parser needs that consistency rather than English.

From file to answer

The export records what happened in your account. It does not tell you how that result compares with an index. BullBenchmark rebuilds your history from the file into a time-weighted return next to the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100, in your own currency, with your own deposits replayed into the index.

The live demo shows the same screens on a sample portfolio, if you would rather look before uploading anything.

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.