Brokers

Bolero (KBC) portfolio tracker: benchmark your Bolero (KBC) portfolio against the S&P 500

We rebuild a Bolero portfolio from the transaction or account overview you download, once you have identified the columns in it. A Belgian broker books taxes and levies on rows of their own beside a trade rather than inside the price, so the file has more lines than you have orders. We have not tested a broad set of Bolero exports, so the first upload asks you to confirm what each column holds and that answer is stored.

What the file contains

An overview of this kind is a dated list of orders executed, dividends credited, tax deducted, charges applied and money transferred in or out. Each order carries the number of securities, the price and the total that was debited or credited.

The separate tax and cost rows are the part people underestimate. They are not decoration: what left your account is the price plus everything booked around it, and a cost basis that ignores those rows understates what a holding cost you from the very first purchase.

A dividend can reach your account after tax has already been taken off it, sometimes more than once when the company is foreign. The file shows what arrived. Where the deduction has a row of its own the gross figure is visible too, and where it does not, only the net amount is.

How the import works for Bolero (KBC)

Bolero (KBC) goes through the column mapper. You point at the date, the type, the amount and the quantity column once, we save that mapping to your account, and later uploads from the same broker are read without a question.

We do not print a click path here, because menu names move between releases and a wrong one costs you more time than no one at all. Look for the transaction history or the account statement of your Bolero (KBC) account and take the machine-readable version of it over the PDF.

Take the whole period, from your first order onward. A holding you have owned for six years cannot get a purchase price out of an overview that begins two years ago, and nothing further down the chain can repair that.

Check that the file carries a currency on every row if you hold anything outside the euro, because an amount with no currency next to it cannot be converted and a guess there is not something you would want inside a total. The mapping you confirm is kept and reused for later files with the same columns.

What to watch for with Bolero (KBC) files

Taxes and levies on separate rows. What a purchase cost you is spread over more than one line. Those lines are added back to the trade they belong to, which is what makes the cost of a position match the money that actually left your account.

One platform, two names. Bolero is KBC's investing platform, so documents can carry either name depending on where they came from. That changes nothing about the rows inside the file.

Dutch or French exports. Column labels and booking texts follow the language your account is set to. The mapper does not read labels, you do, so a file in Dutch or in French is imported exactly like one in English.

Corporate actions. A split or a fund merger changes the number of securities you hold without any money moving. When a share count stops agreeing with the app from one date onwards, that booking is usually where it happened.

What you see after the upload

Your file becomes a verdict first: your time-weighted return next to the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 over the same period, with your own deposits replayed into the index so both sides carry the same timing. Under it sit your positions with their cost basis, the dividends you received and the income your holdings are expected to pay, your allocation across positions and currencies, and a year report you can keep for your records.

Because the tax and charge rows are folded back into the trades they belong to, the yearly report shows what a holding really cost you next to what it paid out.

You can look at all of that on the demo portfolio before you upload anything of your own. The first two weeks are free and no card is asked for.

Frequently asked questions

Which Bolero file should I use? A transaction or account overview covering the full period, downloaded as a CSV or a spreadsheet file rather than as a printable document. It needs a date, an amount and a currency on every row, plus a quantity and a price on the trade rows. Everything else in the file is useful context and not strictly required.

Why are there more lines than orders? Because the price, the transaction charges and the tax on the transaction are booked separately. One purchase can therefore occupy three or four rows. They are grouped back together on import by date and by security, so the position ends up with the full amount that left your account attached to it.

My cost basis looks too low. What is usually the cause? Charge and tax rows that were left out of the export or not identified during mapping. Without them a purchase looks cheaper than it was, and the error repeats on every trade rather than showing up once. Re-exporting with those rows included and mapping them as charges corrects the whole history at once.

Is a holdings overview enough on its own? No. It lists what you own today at today's prices and contains no purchase dates, no amounts paid and no dividends, so there is nothing in it from which a return could be computed. It does make a good check on the result: the positions it shows should match what the transaction history adds up to.