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comdirect portfolio tracker: benchmark your comdirect portfolio against the S&P 500

We merge the two comdirect exports, the depot transactions and the settlement account, into one history with a return you can compare. The account file is read through our German bank profile, which recognises headings such as Buchungstag, Umsatzart and Betrag and maps them without asking you. One file on its own is half the story: the depot knows what you traded and the account knows what your money did.

What the file contains

The depot side records the securities: the order date, the quantity, the price and the costs charged on that order. The account side records the money: what left to pay for a purchase, what arrived on a sale, dividends credited, tax deducted, fees debited and transfers from your everyday banking. The German bank profile maps the account file on the booking date, the transaction type, the booking text, the amount, the ISIN and the number of units where those columns are present.

Each half is incomplete in a way of its own. Positions and cost basis can be rebuilt from the depot alone, but the income side would then come out at zero, since dividends are booked as money and the money is in the other file. The account file shows every euro that moved without saying what it bought. Taken together they also carry the dated deposits an index comparison needs.

The export comes as CSV or XLSX, and we read the file as it is: no renaming, no reformatting, no cleaning up in a spreadsheet first. The columns we look for in this export are Buchungstag, Umsatzart, Buchungstext, Betrag, ISIN and Stück.

How the import works for comdirect

comdirect is recognised through a column profile: we know the header names its export uses. That profile follows the documented format rather than a large set of real files, so if a header has been renamed you point at the column once and we save the mapping.

Our comdirect export guide points to online banking in a browser and to two separate downloads: the depot transactions and the transactions of the settlement account. The full route is in our comdirect export guide.

Two files, two ranges, and both have to reach back. Set each as far as the interface allows, repeat per year where it caps you, and upload them together the first time rather than one now and one later. When you refresh the history months from now, take both sides again for the same reason. A spreadsheet download is preferable to a PDF wherever both are offered. Yearly tax paperwork is worth keeping for your tax return, but it is not the material a portfolio history is rebuilt from.

What to watch for with comdirect files

The window that closes. Online transaction views often reach back a limited number of years, and older entries stop being shown without any warning. Exporting your full available history once, and again periodically, is what keeps that from ever costing you anything.

Trade value against the total. One amount leaves out the costs of the order and the other is what actually left the account. Cost basis is built on the amount that really left, because fees are part of what you paid for the position.

Gross income and the tax on it. Investment income is generally credited gross and reduced by tax at source, which appears as a credit and one or more debits around the same date. Counting the net figure alone understates what the holding produced.

Tax debits in the account file. Tax charged on fund holdings turns up in the account file as money leaving, including in a year in which you sold nothing. It is a cash flow, not a fall in the value of what you hold, and the difference matters for the return.

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.

Once both comdirect files are in, the dividend total is the number that proves the merge worked, because that is exactly the figure which stays at zero when only the depot file was uploaded.

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

Do I really need both files? For a complete history, yes. The depot file gives your trades and the account file gives dividends, taxes, fees and deposits. Uploading only the first produces positions that look correct next to a return that is quietly too low, and that particular error never announces itself anywhere on the screen.

What does the German bank profile actually do? It recognises an account export by its headings and maps the columns for you. It is built on the documented layout of this style of file, so it is deliberately strict: where the headings do not match, the file falls through to the route in which you assign the columns yourself instead of being read incorrectly.

How far back does my history go? That depends on your bank rather than on us, and it is worth finding out before you need the old data. Where the range is capped, exporting year by year and uploading each part gives the same result. If a year has already dropped out of the online view, the bank can usually still supply older statements on request.

Is the annual tax certificate useful for importing? Not for rebuilding a history. It summarises a year for the tax authorities and does not contain the individual transactions a return is calculated from. Keep it for your tax return and use the transaction exports for the portfolio; the two documents answer different questions and neither can be derived from the other.