Brokers

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

We rebuild a Lightyear portfolio from the transaction export you download, after the columns in it have been identified once. The account can hold balances in more than one currency, so a single file can carry euros, dollars and pounds on different rows. We have not seen enough real Lightyear files to recognise the layout on sight, so the mapping is something you confirm rather than something we assume.

What the file contains

A transaction export from a broker of this kind lists purchases and sales with the number of shares and the price, dividends as they are received, any tax deducted from them, the charges applied and every movement of money into or out of the account.

Each row needs three things to be usable: a date, an amount and a currency. Trades need two more, a quantity and a price. Once those five have been pointed out, positions, a cost basis and a complete cash-flow history follow from the file without anything else being required.

If your account earns interest on an uninvested balance, those rows are income on cash. They belong in what the account produced, and they do not belong in the performance of the holdings you picked, so the two totals are shown apart.

How the import works for Lightyear

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

Download the whole period in one go where the export allows it, and otherwise take it year by year and upload the set. Overlap does no harm, because a row already imported is recognised rather than counted a second time.

Keep the decimals. Fractional shares are ordinary at a broker that sells them, and a spreadsheet that rounds a quantity to two places changes your position without mentioning it. The mapping you confirm is stored against this broker, so a later file with the same columns needs no work at all.

What to watch for with Lightyear files

More than one currency balance. Money can sit in several currencies inside one account, and moving between them is a movement rather than a result. Conversions are kept out of your return and every event is converted at the rate on its date.

Fractional holdings. Buying for a fixed sum of money rather than a whole number of shares leaves quantities with a long tail of decimals. That tail is the position itself, not a rounding artefact to be tidied away.

Net or gross dividends. Where the file records only what landed in your balance, the tax deducted is invisible and your income looks smaller than it was. If the export carries a separate tax row, identify it, because the two together are the real figure.

A layout we do not know yet. Nothing here is recognised in advance. That makes the first upload slower and it removes a category of silent failure, because you decide what each column means and a wrong guess by us is not among the things that can happen.

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 a conversion between currency balances counts as a movement rather than a result, the allocation view shows what you own instead of where your cash happened to be sitting.

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

What kind of file should I export? A transaction or activity export in CSV or spreadsheet form, covering everything from your first purchase to today. A list of current holdings is not enough on its own: it shows what you own at this moment and carries no purchase dates, no prices paid and no dividends, so no return can be derived from it.

Will the mapping survive a new export? As long as the columns are the same, yes. The answer you gave is stored against this broker and applied to later files automatically. If the broker changes the layout, the mapper opens again for that file only, and everything already imported keeps the meaning it was given at the time.

My quantities look wrong. What is the usual cause? A spreadsheet that rounded fractional shares before the file was uploaded. The second cause is the quantity column and the amount column being identified the wrong way round during mapping. Both show up as positions that are off by a factor rather than by a little, and both are fixed by re-importing the original file.

Does a currency conversion count as a gain? No. Moving euros into dollars inside the same account changes the unit your money is held in and not how much you have. It is recorded as a movement, and the effect of the exchange rate shows up where it belongs: in what your holdings are worth when they are restated into the base currency you chose.