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Renta 4 portfolio tracker: benchmark your Renta 4 portfolio against the S&P 500

We turn a Renta 4 transaction export into a history that separates what your holdings did from what the exchange rate did. Renta 4 reaches beyond the home market, so a Spanish account can hold shares settling in dollars, in pounds or in something else again. A file like that is only as good as its currency column, which is the field most worth checking before you trust the first result.

What the file contains

Each row gives a date, an operation, the instrument, a quantity, a price and an amount, with the charge on the order either beside it or booked on its own. Where the account reaches outside the home market, the currency of the row matters as much as the number in it: a price of 210 means something quite different in dollars than in euros, and a file that leaves the currency implicit invites exactly that mistake.

We keep the currency as written and convert on the date of the event rather than on the day you happen to be looking. That is what stops a purchase made three years ago at a different rate from being rewritten every time the euro moves. Income from foreign shares is handled the same way, and tax withheld abroad is kept as its own amount, so what you received can be shown both before and after that deduction.

How the import works for Renta 4

Renta 4 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 Renta 4 account and take the machine-readable version of it over the PDF.

Assign the currency column even when most rows are in euros, because the exceptions are the ones that would otherwise be wrong. Beyond that the usual applies: take the range back to the first operation and include the cash movements rather than the orders alone. Custody and account charges are booked apart from trades and are easy to lose from a filtered export; with them included, you see what holding the portfolio cost and not only what trading it cost.

What to watch for with Renta 4 files

Currency belongs to the row. One account can contain rows in several currencies at once. Each is read with the currency it carries, and a missing currency column is the fastest way to get a plausible looking total that is wrong.

Tax withheld abroad. A dividend from a foreign company can be reduced in the country of the company before it reaches you. Kept as a separate amount, it explains the difference between the payment that was announced and the money that arrived.

Charges without a trade. Custody and account charges appear on dates when nothing was bought or sold. They are costs of holding rather than costs of trading, and both belong in a return that claims to be complete.

One company, several listings. A share bought on one exchange and later on another can appear under two different tickers. Matching on the ISIN keeps that from turning into two separate positions in your overview.

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 a Renta 4 account the currency breakdown is the screen that answers the real question, because a strong year abroad and a weak euro do not feel different until they are separated.

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

How is the exchange rate applied? On the date of each event. A purchase in dollars is converted at the rate that applied when you made it, and a dividend at the rate on the day it was paid. Converting everything at today's rate would be simpler and would also change your history every time the currency moves, which is why we do not do it.

My export has no currency column. What now? You set a default currency for the file, and every row is then read in that currency. That is fine for an account holding only euro instruments and wrong for anything else, so it is worth checking whether the export can be produced with the currency included before you settle for a default.

Are custody charges included in the return? Yes, when they are in the file. They are read as costs on the date they were taken, which lowers the return by exactly the amount they took. An export filtered down to orders leaves them out, and the result then describes a portfolio that was cheaper to hold than yours actually was.

Can I see how much of my return came from the currency? Yes. Because every event keeps the currency it happened in and the rate of its own date, the part of the result that came from the exchange rate can be shown apart from the part that came from the shares. That split is often the difference between a year that felt good and a year that was good.