Brokers

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

We take a flatex transaction list and rebuild the orders, the income and the charges that sit behind your current depot. flatex is an online broker rather than a bank you also pay your rent from, so the trading side and the cash side sit closer together than they do in a bank export. The headings are German and the layout is not one we have tested, so you point the columns out once and that choice is reused from then on.

What the file contains

A broker transaction list is closer to a ledger than a bank statement is. Each row tends to carry the date of the order, what was bought or sold, the quantity, the price per unit, the total that moved and the costs charged on that order. Securities are identified by ISIN, and frequently by a national identifier and a full name as well.

From those rows the entire calculation follows. Purchases and sales give the average cost of everything still held, and because the costs sit on the row they can be kept as fees instead of quietly raising the price you appear to have paid. Dividends and the tax on them give the income. Deposits into the account give the dates the index comparison replays. Where the list covers orders only, income and deposits are absent and the return reads lower than it was.

How the import works for flatex

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

Mapping a German file is a short job done once. The date, the type of transaction, the quantity, the price, the total amount and the currency are the fields that matter; anything else can stay unassigned without harming the result. Take the longest range the interface offers rather than the year to date. And where the only record of an event is a settlement document, use it to check a number rather than as the source, because a document has to be read by a person and a table does not.

What to watch for with flatex files

Decimal commas and semicolons. German exports commonly write decimals with a comma and separate fields with a semicolon. Both are read as they come, so the file does not have to be converted before you upload it.

Costs on the order row. The charge for an order sits next to the order rather than inside the price. Kept as a fee, it stays countable, and a year of trading costs becomes a figure rather than an impression.

Savings plans on trackers. A monthly plan on an exchange traded fund produces a purchase every month, often for a fractional number of units. The fractions are kept as written, since rounding them moves the position.

Corporate actions. Splits, mergers and fund changes arrive as rows that are neither a purchase nor a sale. Skipped, they make your share count drift away from what the depot actually shows.

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.

With a flatex history loaded, the cost overview is the screen that tends to be new information, because charges spread across hundreds of order rows never look like a total.

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 columns do you actually need? A date, something that says what happened, and an amount. A quantity and a price make positions and cost basis possible, and a currency column matters as soon as you hold anything settled outside the euro. We propose a match from your headings first and you correct it where the proposal is wrong, which takes one pass.

Do I need to convert the file first? No. A comma as the decimal separator and a semicolon between fields are both handled, and so are the usual European date orders. Converting a file by hand is the step that most often introduces an error, because reformatting dates and rounding decimals is exactly what a spreadsheet does while it opens one.

What happens after a share split? A split arrives as a booking that changes your quantity without money moving. Left out of the file, your share count no longer matches the depot and every price per share around it looks wrong. Include the full transaction list rather than only the orders, and check your quantities against the depot after the first import.

What if the file has no ISIN column? Then the instrument is matched on the name or the ticker instead, and you confirm once that the right security was found. An identifier is more reliable, because a name can be written two ways in the same export, so if the interface offers a version of the list that includes one, that is the version worth taking.