Brokers

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

We rebuild a Swissquote portfolio from the transaction overview you download, once the columns in it have been identified. A Swiss account routinely holds francs next to dollars and euros, so one portfolio is recorded in several currencies at the same time. We have not tested a large set of Swissquote files, so the first upload asks you to confirm which column holds the date, the amount and the quantity, and that answer is kept.

What the file contains

A transaction or account overview from a bank-style broker is a dated list of everything that moved: purchases and sales with their prices, dividends received, tax withheld, custody and transaction charges, currency conversions, and money paid in or taken out.

What the arithmetic needs from each of those rows is small: a date, an amount and a currency, with a quantity and a price added for trades. From those five things a position, a cost basis and a full cash-flow history can be rebuilt. The rest of the file is detail worth keeping and showing rather than detail the calculation depends on.

Charges at this kind of institution are usually booked on rows of their own beside the trade instead of inside the price. They are still part of what the position cost, and they are treated that way.

How the import works for Swissquote

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

Export the full period, and if the account holds more than one currency make sure a currency column is in the file rather than implied by which sub-account you were looking at. An amount with no currency beside it cannot be converted, and a guess at that point is not something you want inside a total.

The mapping you confirm on the first upload is stored, so later files with the same columns go straight through. Where a later export arrives with a different set of columns, the mapper opens again instead of anything being assumed.

What to watch for with Swissquote files

Several currencies at once. Francs, euros and dollars can sit in one account. Each row is converted at the rate on its own date, and the base currency you pick is only the unit the answers are presented in.

Tax withheld abroad. A dividend from a foreign company arrives with tax already deducted. The gross payment and the deduction are two separate facts, and a total that only knows the net figure understates what the holding produced.

Labels in your account language. The export follows the language the account is set to. For the mapping that changes nothing, because you point at the columns yourself instead of relying on a label being recognised.

Conversions between balances. Moving francs into dollars inside the same account is a movement, not a result. Booked as a trade it would invent activity that never bought anything.

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.

The verdict is shown in the base currency you choose, which for an account holding three of them is the only way a single total means anything.

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 file works best? Any transaction or account overview in CSV or spreadsheet form that covers the whole period and carries a date, an amount and a currency on every row. A holdings snapshot cannot produce a return, because it says nothing about what you paid or when. A downloaded PDF is a picture of a table rather than the table itself.

Do I have to identify the columns on every upload? No. You do it once for this broker and the choice is saved against it. Later files with the same columns are imported without the step. The mapper only reappears when the layout changes, which is deliberate: a changed layout is exactly the moment when guessing would do damage.

My totals look wrong after the first import. What should I check? Three things, in order. Whether the quantity column and the amount column were identified the right way round, whether the currency column was included, and whether the export really starts before your first purchase. Correcting the mapping and uploading the same file again resolves nearly every case.

Can I keep francs as my display currency? Yes. Pick the base currency you think in and every row is restated into it at the rate from its own date. Changing that choice later re-presents the same imported facts and never alters them, so you can look at the portfolio in francs one day and in euros the next.