Publisher: WM STUDIOS. Last updated: 21 August 2026. This page describes file practice and calculation mechanisms. It is neither investment advice nor tax advice.
A photograph or a film: the distinction that decides everything
Brokers offer two very different exports, often given similar names.
The positions statement is a photograph: what you hold at a given moment, with a quantity and sometimes a cost basis computed by the broker. It contains no history.
The transactions statement, also called trade history or account movements, is the film: every purchase, every sale, every dividend, every fee, each with its date.
The consequence is immediate. From a photograph, a tool can show the value of your portfolio. A statement gives clues about the cost basis, but it is rarely enough to reconstruct the full history of operations: realised gains and dividend history usually do not appear in it.
If you remember one thing: look for the export that contains transaction dates. That is the right file.
What an import must capture, line by line
For a history to be usable, every line has to carry eight pieces of information. A file that loses even one degrades everything that depends on it.
| Field | Why it is indispensable |
|---|---|
| Date of the transaction | Orders the ledger, and sets the tax year it belongs to |
| Direction (buy, sell, dividend, fee…) | A misread direction flips the sign of everything else |
| Quantity | With its decimals: fund units are not whole numbers |
| Unit price | The basis of the cost basis |
| Currency | Without it, an amount is a number with no meaning |
| Exchange rate on the day | Otherwise conversion happens at today's rate and distorts the history |
| Fees and taxes | They form part of the acquisition price and reduce the gain |
| Security identifier | Preferably an ISIN, which is more stable than a name |
The role of fees deserves emphasis: they are not an accounting detail. A history imported at market price, fees excluded, produces a cost basis that is too low, and therefore an overstated gain. The mechanism is set out in the page on the weighted average acquisition price.
The events that break imports
Purchases and sales cause no difficulty. It is corporate actions that derail history migrations, because they change the quantity held without being a purchase or a sale.
Splits and consolidations. The number of shares changes, the total value does not. An import that reads a split as an inflow of free shares divides your cost basis by the wrong factor, or wipes it. Worse: if the file does not state the ratio, the cost of earlier lots cannot be reconstructed without outside information.
Spin-offs and rights distributions. You receive shares in a new entity without paying anything. Their fiscal cost basis must be computed according to the specific rules of the operation: economically, a share of your original investment has been transferred to them. Without special handling, the gain on the original holding is overstated and the gain on the new one is wrong.
Scrip dividends. Both income and an inflow of shares. Counted once, they produce either phantom income or a quantity with no cost.
Cancel and rebook. A transaction corrected by the broker often appears twice, once cancelled and once replayed. Without neutralising the pair, the quantity doubles.
Incoming transfers of securities. This is the most painful and the most common case. When you transfer a portfolio from one broker to another, the receiving broker knows your securities but not always the price you paid for them. Its statement may therefore show a holding with no acquisition price, or with a cost basis rebuilt as at the transfer date. The only remedy is to keep the statements from the previous broker: those carry your real cost.
Format traps, less dramatic but more frequent
The decimal separator. A French file writes 1 234,56 where an English one writes 1,234.56. Read with the wrong convention, the first becomes 123,456 and the second 1.23. The error is silent.
Ambiguous dates. 03/04/2026 is either 3 April or 4 March depending on convention. On an export without a full year or a declared format, only context settles it.
Sub-unit currencies. London listed shares are often quoted in pence rather than pounds. An import that treats a pence price as a pound multiplies the line by a hundred. The same trap exists elsewhere in other forms.
Security identifiers. The same security carries different symbols depending on the listing venue, and some names change over the course of corporate actions. The ISIN is the only stable reference.
Multi-sheet files. Some exports spread transactions, cash movements and corporate actions across several tabs. Importing only one gives an incomplete history with nothing to flag it.
A method that limits the damage
Three habits avoid most of the unpleasant surprises.
Export the longest period available, back to the account's first transaction. A truncated history does not give an approximate cost basis: it gives a wrong one, since the missing purchases carry no weight in the average.
Keep the original files. They are your supporting documents and the only source to return to in case of doubt. They become indispensable again when you change broker.
Check two numbers after the import: the quantity held on each line, and the cash balance. If they match the broker's statement, the ledger is probably complete. If they differ, the gap points to the missing transaction.
Where to find this import in PulseMyPortfolio
Nine broker formats are recognised by name: Saxo, Trade Republic, DEGIRO, Fortuneo, Bourse Direct, Linxea, Interactive Brokers, Swissquote and Trading 212. Alongside them sit a bank statement reader, for current account movements, and a generic format that takes any tabular file and identifies its columns.
The Saxo format is the most thoroughly covered, including the cases described above: spin-offs with a cash element, consolidations, rights distributions, cancel and rebook pairs, and pence quotations. Each format has its own tests, which is the only honest way of saying that a case is genuinely handled.
Two practical points. Your manual corrections are preserved when you re-import the same file, and the application confirms how many were kept at the end: you can therefore re-import without losing your clean up work. And the import runs entirely on your device: the file is not sent anywhere.
The application describes what your statement contains; it does not tell you what to do about it. The tax amounts it derives are indicative, your broker's annual statement being what counts.
Sources
This page describes file practice rather than regulation: export formats are each broker's own and change without notice. One legal reference does apply, the one that justifies the precision required on fees and corporate actions.
- BOFiP, special rules for determining the acquisition price: treatment of events that change the cost basis, in French.
- French Code général des impôts, article 150-0 D: weighted average price and inclusion of acquisition costs, in French.
Further reading
The page on the weighted average acquisition price explains what becomes of an imported history, and the one on tracking dividends details the flows a transactions statement contains. The frequently asked questions cover how the application works.