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Brand New Day portfolio tracker: benchmark your Brand New Day portfolio against the S&P 500

We read a Brand New Day transaction overview and rebuild the contributions, the units they bought and the value that followed from them. Brand New Day invests through index funds with periodic contributions, so the history reads as a series of payments and unit purchases rather than as trades on an exchange. If you also hold a pension or annuity pot there, that is a separate account with separate rules and it belongs in an upload of its own.

What the file contains

Expect a plain list: a date, a description, an amount and the number of units the amount bought. Where several funds are held, each fund has its own rows and its own unit price, and the fund is named in full and often identified by ISIN as well. Where a charge is taken as a separate amount, it appears as its own row instead of raising the unit price.

The calculation follows directly. Contributions build the cost basis of each fund, and because units are bought at whatever the price happens to be on the dealing day, an average price is the honest way to describe what you paid. The dates of those contributions are then used a second time, to build the comparison: the same amounts, on the same days, in an index tracker. A monthly plan and a lump sum can produce very different comparisons out of the same total.

How the import works for Brand New Day

Brand New Day 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 Brand New Day account and take the machine-readable version of it over the PDF.

Keep the pots apart. A free investment account and a pension pot are different money with different access, and pouring them into one file produces a portfolio that exists for no purpose you actually have. Export each of them on its own, so you can decide which history you are looking at. Beyond that, take the full period, and where the overview is offered as a document as well as a spreadsheet file, take the spreadsheet: a table can be recalculated and a document can only be looked at.

What to watch for with Brand New Day files

Automatic contributions. A recurring payment produces a row every month, and a month that failed or was skipped is easy to overlook. It shows up as a flat stretch in the contribution timeline once the history is loaded.

Costs as their own rows. Where a charge is booked as a separate amount, it is read as a fee rather than folded into the price of the units. A year of costs then becomes a number you can look at instead of something hidden in an average.

Switching funds. Moving from one fund to another usually appears as a sale of units in the first and a purchase in the second on the same date. The old holding closes with a result and the new one starts with a basis of its own.

No exchange, no ticker. Fund units are not traded on an exchange, so there is no ticker and no price during the day. The identifier that travels between systems is the ISIN.

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.

After a Brand New Day upload the comparison screen is the interesting one, because equal monthly amounts are exactly the case where a single lump sum comparison would mislead you.

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

Should I upload my pension account as well? Only as a separate export, and only if you want to see it. Pension money is locked and taxed differently from a free investment account, so one blended percentage across both answers a question nobody asked. Exported on its own, each pot can be judged on its own terms and against a benchmark measured over the same dates.

There is no ticker in my file. Is that a problem? No. Funds are identified by ISIN, which is more precise than a ticker anyway, since one fund can carry different tickers in different places. Where the ISIN is present it is what we match on; where it is absent, the fund name is used and you confirm the match a single time.

How do I check that the import went well? Compare the number of units per fund in our overview with the number the provider shows you today. If they agree, everything in between has been read correctly. If they do not, the range is almost always the cause, and a wider export fixes it far more often than any correction by hand would.

Does a missed monthly payment matter? For the arithmetic, no. Contributions are read as they actually happened, so a skipped month is simply a month without a cash flow. For the comparison it matters only in the sense that the index side skips it too, which is the point: the measurement is of your real money on your real dates.