Broker guides

Trading 212 export guide: getting your full history out

Trading 212 exports your history as a CSV file that arrives by email. The export sits under Menu, then History, and covers at most one year per file. It holds three data types, Orders, Dividends and Transactions, and you need all three for a complete picture.

This guide covers the export route, the columns that deserve a second look, the Pies detail that confuses most people at least once, and what to verify before you trust anything built on the file.

How to export from Trading 212

Open Menu, then History, then the export icon (top right). The route is the same in the app and on the web.
Pick the date range. One export covers at most one year.
Tick all three data types: Orders, Dividends and Transactions (deposits and withdrawals).
Wait for the email. The CSV arrives within a few minutes.
Repeat per year if your history is longer than one year.
Upload the file or files to BullBenchmark.

Include all three data types. Miss one and your numbers are wrong without any visible sign. Do not let Excel round the fractional shares either, because those seven decimals are part of your position.

What the export is for

Trading 212's app is pleasant to use, which is one reason so few people pull their data out of it. The app answers a narrow set of questions (what you hold, how the line looks). It says nothing about the questions that determine whether your investing is working.

What is your time-weighted return, the figure you can compare with an index? What did you pay for each position once fees and currency conversion are counted? What did dividends contribute, and at what rate are they arriving?

All of those answers live in your transaction history, and the export is your complete, portable copy of that history. It is also your record if you switch brokers, do your taxes, or want your bookkeeping to exist somewhere other than one company's app. Downloading it costs a few minutes.

What the three data types contain

Orders rebuild your positions and cost basis. Dividends record the income your holdings generated. Transactions establish when money entered and left the account, which is what return calculations are anchored to.

Leave one out and the resulting picture is wrong in ways that show no error. A missing deposit, for instance, makes your return look better than it was, and few people investigate an error in their favour.

What the columns mean

The Action column holds every event type: "Market buy", "Limit sell", "Dividend (Ordinary)", "Deposit". One file with every event mixed together is convenient, because nothing gets lost between files.

No. of shares can be fractional. A line with 0.0384741 of an Apple share is normal in a T212 export. If you ever move the data to a spreadsheet, format those cells before Excel rounds your history.

Exchange rate is included per transaction. Your euro cost basis for USD stocks can be computed from the file without external FX data.

The fractional shares deserve emphasis, because rounding them is the most common way people damage this file. Seven decimal places of a share is how fractional investing works, and those digits carry your position. Rounded to two decimals, your share counts stop matching your account, your cost basis shifts, and small gains or losses appear that never happened.

The same caution applies to the exchange-rate column. That per-transaction rate is what makes a correct home-currency cost basis possible, because it records the conversion that took place instead of leaving you or your tool to guess with external data. If you are doing the arithmetic yourself, average cost basis explained walks through what to do with it.

What Pies look like in the file

If you invest through Pies, individual purchases still show up as separate order lines. Rebalancing, however, generates a burst of small buys and sells that can look alarming in your realized-gains view. That is normal. Viewed per position rather than per transaction, the noise disappears.

A rebalance trims what has grown and tops up what has lagged, so it sells slivers of your winners, each sliver realizing a small gain, and buys slivers of the rest. Fifty small transactions later, your history looks like that of a very active trader, while you changed nothing about your strategy.

If the distinction between realized and paper results is unclear, realized vs unrealized gains covers it.

What goes wrong

Four mistakes, in descending order of frequency. The first is exporting only Orders and wondering where the dividends went. They are a separate data type, so tick all three.

The second is a gap between files. The one-year maximum means a multi-year history takes several exports, and a missing year produces sales without purchases and positions without an origin.

The third is opening the CSV in Excel, saving it, and uploading the saved copy. Excel reformats dates and decimals, which is how a correct file becomes a broken one. Upload the original from the email.

The fourth is exporting a range that starts after your first trade. That corrupts the cost basis of everything you bought before the cutoff.

What to check after exporting

Two minutes of verification saves an hour of confusion later.

Confirm that the earliest file reaches back to your first trade, and that consecutive files leave no gap in dates.
Net out the buys and sells for a couple of holdings and check that the result matches what the app shows today.
Spot-check that dividend rows exist for months you know you were paid.
Confirm that every deposit you remember making appears as a Transaction row.

If anything is missing, the fix is almost always another export with a corrected range or the missing data type ticked. The underlying record at Trading 212 is complete. The export settings are where things go wrong.

Frequently asked questions

Why does the export arrive by email instead of downloading directly? That is how Trading 212 delivers it. You request the file, and the CSV lands in your inbox within a few minutes.

Can I get my full history in one file? No. The maximum range per export is one year. Export one file per year and upload them together. Merging is the tracker's job.

Do the Pies show up in the export? Yes, as ordinary order lines. The export does not label which Pie a purchase belonged to. For cost basis, returns and dividends that does not matter, because a buy is a buy.

Does uploading the CSV give anyone access to my account? No. A file-based tracker never sees your login, only the history you chose to export. The reasoning behind that design is in portfolio tracking without broker login.

How often should I export? Monthly suits most people. The file is cumulative history, so a fresh export always contains everything the previous one did, plus whatever happened since.

From export to answer

The export tells you what happened. It does not tell you your time-weighted return, whether your picks beat an index tracker, or what your dividend run rate looks like. Upload the same CSV to BullBenchmark and those answers are on one screen, updated daily against the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100.

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.