Brokers

Saxo Bank portfolio tracker: benchmark your Saxo Bank portfolio against the S&P 500

We read a Saxo Bank trade export and rebuild what you bought, what you sold and what each position came to in the currency you choose. In the layout we recognise the column called Amount holds the number of units rather than a sum of money, and the money is in TradedValue. That layout is a trade list, so dividends and cash movements have to come from a second export if your account produced one.

What the file contains

Each row is one execution: a trade date, the instrument by name and by symbol, a marker saying whether it was a purchase or a sale, the number of units, the price and the traded value, with the currency of that trade alongside.

The traded value is the money side of the row, and the price multiplied by the units is the value before anything else is added. Where charges are booked on rows of their own instead of inside the trade, they are kept as charges, because a purchase price that excludes them understates what the position cost you.

Trades are reported in the currency of the market they happened in, and one account can hold several currencies at the same time. Every row is converted at the rate on its trade date rather than at the rate today, so your history stops moving when the exchange rate does.

The columns we look for in this export are TradeDate, Instrument, InstrumentSymbol, B/S, Amount, Price, TradedValue and Currency.

How the import works for Saxo Bank

Saxo Bank 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.

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

Take the whole period, and take every product you hold. An account that mixes shares with funds produces a partial picture when only one export is uploaded, and a partial picture is harder to spot than an empty one.

If your file also lists dividends and cash movements, they are read from the same upload. If it does not, what you get is the result of your trading rather than a total return, and it is worth knowing which of the two you are looking at before comparing it with anything.

What to watch for with Saxo Bank files

Amount means units. The column named Amount is the size of the trade in units, not a sum of money. Read as cash it produces figures that look plausible and are wrong by orders of magnitude, which is why that column is confirmed rather than assumed.

Several currencies in one account. Holding dollars next to euros is routine here. Converting everything at a single rate would discard information the file recorded correctly.

A trade list is not a full ledger. Without dividend and funding rows there is nothing for a benchmark to replay, because a fair comparison needs the dates your money arrived as well as what you bought.

Splits and mergers. A share split is not a trade, so a trade-only export can leave a share count that no longer matches the account. When the number of units looks wrong from a particular date onwards, a corporate action is the usual explanation.

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.

Allocation is grouped by what an instrument actually is, so a portfolio spread across several Saxo currencies still adds up to one set of weights.

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 Saxo export should I upload? The one that lists your executed trades over the full period, as a CSV or a spreadsheet file. If a separate report covers dividends, costs and money in and out, upload that as well. Two files from one broker merge into a single history, and the origin of every row is kept so you can trace a figure back.

Why does my return look as though it ignores dividends? Because a trade-only file has no income in it. Purchases and sales tell you what happened to the price of a holding and nothing about what it paid you along the way. Adding an export that carries the dividend rows changes that number, sometimes by more than people expect over a long holding period.

The units column looks like money to me. Is that a problem? It is the single most common misreading of this format. The column named Amount holds units and the column named TradedValue holds money. If your positions come out enormous or minuscule after an import, that swap is the first thing to check and it is corrected in the mapper.

Can I show everything in one currency? Yes. You pick a base currency and every row is restated into it using the rate from its own date. The underlying amounts stay as the broker recorded them, so switching the display currency later changes the presentation and never the imported facts.