Brokers

Bourse Direct portfolio tracker: benchmark your Bourse Direct portfolio against the S&P 500

We take a Bourse Direct transaction export and rebuild the order history, the income and the cash movements behind your positions. This is a broker rather than a bank, and the files show it: the detail is at the level of the individual order, which makes them long for anyone who trades regularly. Length is not a problem for the calculation, but it does mean an incomplete range hides better here than it would in a short file.

What the file contains

Each row describes one operation: the date, what it was, the instrument, the quantity, the price obtained and the amount that moved, with the brokerage charge either on the same row or as a booking of its own. Where an order was executed in several parts, each part can appear separately, and all of them belong in the file rather than being summarised into one line by hand.

That level of detail is what makes the arithmetic exact. Average cost is calculated across every partial execution, so the price you actually achieved is used rather than the price you aimed at. Charges are counted as costs rather than folded into the basis. Dividends are recorded on the date they were credited. Cash paid in and taken out gives the timeline that an index comparison follows, which is what stops a good year from being credited to you when it was mostly a deposit.

How the import works for Bourse Direct

Bourse Direct 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 Bourse Direct account and take the machine-readable version of it over the PDF.

Long files reward two checks. Confirm that the oldest row really is your first operation and not the first row of the range the interface offered, and confirm that the total number of rows looks plausible for the years covered. After that the mapping itself is short: date, operation, instrument, quantity, price, amount and currency, assigned once from a proposal and stored. Order confirmations for individual trades are useful for checking a single figure, but they are documents and not a source to import from.

What to watch for with Bourse Direct files

Partial executions. One order can be filled in several pieces at slightly different prices. All the pieces are read, and the average of them is what the position actually cost you.

Brokerage on every order. An active account accumulates charges that no individual row makes look significant. Counted together across a year, they are the difference between a return and an estimate.

Short holding periods. Positions opened and closed inside a period leave a realized result and no holding. Those results belong in the return even though nothing remains on the screen to show for them.

Envelope rules still apply. A restricted share plan and an ordinary account behave differently, and they are worth exporting separately even when the file format is identical for both. What may be held and when money can leave are not the same in each.

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.

For an order heavy Bourse Direct history the realized results view is the one that repays attention, because closed positions vanish from a broker screen and stay in the return.

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

My export runs to thousands of rows. Does that matter? No. A long file is read the same way a short one is, and more detail makes the average cost more accurate rather than less. What matters is that the file is complete, so check the oldest row rather than the row count. A file that is long and starts too late is still a file that starts too late.

How are trades that I closed years ago treated? As realized results on the date of the sale. They are part of what you earned over the period even though nothing remains in the portfolio to represent them. A screen that only shows current holdings cannot tell you this, which is one of the reasons a full transaction history is worth exporting at all.

Do I need the order confirmations as well? No. They confirm single trades and are useful when one figure looks wrong, but they are documents rather than tables and there is nothing in them that the transaction export does not already carry. Keep them for your own records and import the export.

What if a row type is read incorrectly? You correct it and the correction stays. Operations are classified from the wording in the type column, and an unusual description can end up in the wrong category. Since every row remains visible with its original text, a mistake is something you can see and repair rather than something that silently shifts a total.