How to track a portfolio across multiple brokerages

A taxable account at one broker, a Roth IRA at another, a 401(k) through work, an old account you never closed — and each app proudly shows its own percentage gain, calculated its own way. None of them can tell you the one thing you want to know: how is your money doing overall, and is it beating a simple index fund?

Answering that takes one consolidated record and a few rules about what counts as new money. Here is how to set it up.

Why the per-account numbers don't add up

• Different methods. One app shows return on cost, another a time-weighted return, a third a money-weighted return since you opened the account. You can't average them.
• Transfers look like gains or losses. Move $20,000 from one brokerage to another and the first account shows a withdrawal, the second a deposit — neither is investment performance.
• Cost basis can go missing. When positions move between brokers, the original purchase prices don't always come along, especially for shares bought years ago.
• Cash hides. Uninvested cash in a sweep or settlement fund drags your overall return but rarely shows up in "performance" screens.

Step 1: list every account

Write down every account that holds investments: taxable brokerage accounts, traditional and Roth IRAs, 401(k) or 403(b) plans, HSAs you invest, and any old accounts. For each, note the owner, the account type and how far back its history goes.

Step 2: export the full history

Most brokerages let you download account activity as a CSV file from the activity or history section of their website, often limited to a year or a few years per download — repeat until you've covered everything. Some only offer monthly PDF statements for older years; for those, the year-end statement and your 1099-B forms give you positions and cost basis. Interactive Brokers users can download an Activity Statement for any custom date range.

Keep the raw files: they're your audit trail if numbers ever disagree.

Step 3: build one ledger

Combine everything into a single table with the same columns for every account:

Column	Example
Date	2026-03-14
Account	Roth IRA (Broker B)
Type	buy, sell, dividend, contribution, withdrawal, transfer in, transfer out, fee
Ticker	VTI
Quantity	12
Price per share	268.40
Amount (USD)	−3,220.80
Note	reinvested dividend, wash sale, split…

Record stock splits as an adjustment of quantity and price, and reinvested dividends as a dividend and a purchase — otherwise your cost basis and share count drift away from your statements.

Step 4: separate new money from internal moves

This is the rule that makes everything else work:

• External cash flows — money from your paycheck into any account, employer 401(k) contributions and matches, withdrawals you actually spend — are contributions and withdrawals of the household portfolio.
• Internal transfers — moving cash or shares between your own accounts (including transfers between brokerages) — are not. Record them as a matching transfer out and transfer in, so they cancel out.

Get this wrong and a simple account transfer looks like a huge deposit and a huge withdrawal, which wrecks any return calculation.

Step 5: check positions against your statements

From the ledger, add up the shares of each holding per account and compare them with the latest statement from each broker. A mismatch almost always means a missing transaction: a reinvested dividend, a corporate action, or a transfer recorded on one side only. Fix it now — errors compound.

Step 6: measure the whole portfolio

With one ledger and clean cash flows you can calculate:

• Total value across all accounts, cash included.
• Net contributions — external flows only.
• Time-weighted return for the household, which ignores when you added money.
• The same contributions in the S&P 500 — what you'd have if every external dollar had gone into an index fund on the same day.

The last two tell you whether your choices are adding value. Our guide to TWR vs MWR shows the formulas.

It's also worth looking at each account type separately, because taxes differ: a dollar in a Roth IRA is worth more than a dollar in a taxable account (see Roth IRA vs taxable brokerage account).

Step 7: keep it up to date

A ledger that's six months stale is a research project. Pick a routine — once a month, after statements arrive — import the new activity, reconcile positions, and glance at your return against the index. Ten minutes a month is enough.

Common mistakes

• Counting transfers as contributions, which inflates both what you put in and what you took out.
• Dropping closed positions. Losses on stocks you sold are part of your record.
• Missing reinvested dividends, which leaves your share counts and cost basis wrong.
• Ignoring splits and spin-offs, so share counts no longer match prices.
• Leaving out cash, which makes your return look better than it was.

Doing it in GetHossa

GetHossa keeps the ledger for you. Interactive Brokers Activity Statements (as well as Revolut and XTB exports) can be imported directly, without sharing a brokerage login, and trades from other brokerages can be added by hand with their date and price, until more imports are supported. The app handles splits and dividends, matches sales to purchases first-in-first-out, and shows your whole portfolio's time-weighted return next to the same contributions invested in the S&P 500. Imports show a preview first, so you can see what will be added or skipped before anything is saved.

This article is for educational purposes only and is not investment advice.