Brokers

Scalable Capital portfolio tracker: benchmark your Scalable Capital portfolio against the S&P 500

Scalable Capital keeps two separate records, one for the brokerage account where you place your own orders and one for a managed portfolio, and a file describing one says nothing about the other. The machine-readable export is organised per position rather than as a single list for the whole account, so a portfolio of eight holdings arrives as a set of files. We have not tested this against a broad range of real files, so you confirm what each column holds on the first upload and that answer is reused afterwards.

What the file contains

A per-position export lists what happened to one holding: the purchases, the savings plan executions, any sales, the dividends it paid and the charges booked against it, each with a date and an amount. That is everything the arithmetic for a single position needs, which is why the split is workable even though it means more downloading.

Several of those files together make the portfolio. That is more downloading than one combined list would be, and it has one advantage: nothing belonging to one holding can end up attributed to another. Uploading them together is fine, and the origin of every row is kept so a figure can be traced back to the file it came from.

Statements and yearly tax paperwork arrive as PDFs. They are worth keeping as your record, and they are not what the arithmetic runs on.

The export comes as CSV or PDF, and we read the file as it is: no renaming, no reformatting, no cleaning up in a spreadsheet first.

How the import works for Scalable Capital

Scalable Capital 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 Scalable Capital account and take the machine-readable version of it over the PDF. There is more detail in our Scalable Capital export guide.

Work out first which product your money sits in, because a managed portfolio and a self-directed account produce very different looking histories from the same login.

In a managed portfolio the rebalancing happens without you, so the file contains transactions you never ordered and a first read makes you look like a very busy trader. That does not change your result; it changes how the activity should be read. Export the full period for each product, keep the two apart while you interpret them and together when you total them up.

What to watch for with Scalable Capital files

One file per holding. The export splits along positions, so a complete history is a set of files rather than a single download. Leaving one out drops a holding from the total without anything appearing to be broken.

Rebalancing noise. A managed strategy trims what has grown and tops up what has lagged, and each small sale banks a small result. Read per transaction that looks alarming; read per holding across a year it becomes an ordinary story.

Savings plan rows. A two-year plan is roughly two dozen rows per fund, each one a dated cash flow. That length is what makes a precise replay of your contributions into an index possible in the first place.

A partner bank on the paperwork. The securities may be held at a partner bank rather than at Scalable Capital itself, which turns up as an unfamiliar name on your documents. It changes nothing about the bookkeeping underneath.

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 both products in one ledger the allocation view stops treating them as two portfolios, and the yearly report totals the charges from each of them.

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 need to upload both products? Only if you use both. A managed portfolio and a self-directed account are separate histories, and each answers only for its own money. Uploaded together they become one portfolio with the source of every row preserved, which is the only way to see a total that covers everything you hold at this broker.

Why does my history contain transactions I never placed? Because a managed strategy rebalances on your behalf. Those purchases and sales are real and they belong in the file, and they say more about the strategy than about you. Totalling the results per holding over a year turns a wall of small transactions back into something you can actually read.

One holding is missing from my portfolio. What happened? Almost certainly a file that was not downloaded, because the export is organised per position rather than per account. Nothing looks broken when this happens, which is what makes it worth checking: compare the list of holdings in the dashboard against the list in the app before trusting a total.

Are the PDF documents any use to you? Not for the calculation. Statements and tax paperwork are pictures of tables, and the arithmetic needs rows. Keep them as your own record, because a broker archive is not permanent, and upload the machine-readable export for anything that has to be added up or compared with an index.