How to track investments across multiple brokerages

The combined total is the easy half

Every brokerage shows you a balance, and adding those balances together is arithmetic you can do in a minute. It is also where most multi-account tracking stops, which is why someone with four brokerages can usually state their total to the dollar and almost nothing else about their own portfolio. The same split shows up when you track your net worth as a whole: the headline number is trivial to produce, and everything that would change a decision sits underneath it.

The distinction that matters is account level versus holding level. At the account level you have four numbers that sum correctly. At the holding level you have one portfolio that happens to be stored in four places, and only that second view can answer what you own, what it cost you, and what it has actually returned.

Four things a split portfolio hides

These are ordered by how long they typically go unnoticed, not by severity. The first is the one nearly everybody has; the third is the one that costs real money.

1. Duplicate exposure. An S&P 500 index fund at one firm, a total-market fund at another and a target-date fund inside an old 401(k) are three different tickers holding substantially the same large-cap US companies. Summed at the account level they look like diversification. Summed at the holding level they are one concentrated position, and the concentration only becomes visible once the funds are looked through to what they hold.
2. Cost basis that did not travel. Shares moved between firms do not always arrive with their purchase history attached, and a receiving brokerage that was never told what you paid cannot compute your gain.
3. Wash sales spanning two firms. Each brokerage computes wash sales only from the trades it can see. A loss at one firm and a repurchase at another is invisible to both, and it is your return that is wrong, not theirs.
4. Blended return. Each firm reports the return on the money it holds. Nobody reports the return on your portfolio, because no single firm has ever seen your portfolio.

The wash sale that neither broker reports

A wash sale happens when you sell a security at a loss and acquire a substantially identical one within 30 days before or after that sale. The disallowed loss is normally added to the cost basis of the replacement shares, so it is deferred rather than forfeited. You get it back when you eventually sell the replacements.

The rule attaches to you, the taxpayer, and not to the account. Your brokerage applies it across the accounts it holds for you, and it has no way to see the trade you placed somewhere else. Two firms can therefore each produce a completely correct 1099-B while your actual tax position matches neither of them. Reconciling that is your responsibility, which is difficult to discharge without a consolidated view of the trades.

Cost basis does not always travel with the shares

When you move securities between firms, the sending broker is required under section 6045A to send the receiving broker a transfer statement carrying the information needed to work out your adjusted basis and holding period, within 15 days of the transfer. That requirement applies to covered securities.

Covered status turns on when you bought. For stock generally, the basis reporting rules apply to shares acquired for cash in an account on or after 1 January 2011, and for shares eligible for the average basis method, on or after 1 January 2012. Anything you bought before those dates is non-covered, and no transfer statement is required for it. That is the gap: a long-held position moved to a new firm can arrive with no basis at all, and the new brokerage will show a blank rather than a wrong number.

Three ways to consolidate, and what each one costs

All three work. They differ in what they ask of you and in what they can see, and the right answer depends on how many firms you hold and how often the positions move.

• A spreadsheet. Free, exact, and it will hold anything you can type: private stock, a rental property, a loan to a sibling. The cost is that it is only as current as the last time you sat down with it, and the failure mode is silent: a stale sheet looks exactly like a fresh one.
• One brokerage's external-account linking. Several firms will pull in balances from your other institutions. It costs nothing and it is already where you log in, but it is built to show one firm's holdings in full detail and the rest as balances, so it tends to answer the account-level question rather than the holding-level one.
• A read-only aggregator. A dedicated tool connects to each institution with credentials it cannot trade on, and merges positions by security. It is the only one of the three that gets you the look-through and the blended return without manual work, and the cost is a subscription plus trusting a third party with read access.

If you go the third route, the question worth asking first is which institutions a given tool can actually reach, because coverage is what decides whether you end up with a consolidated view or a partial one plus a spreadsheet. We publish the institutions we connect to, and a comparison of how the main apps in this category differ, including where each of them does something we do not.

One rule regardless of method: run exactly one. Two systems will disagree, usually because of a dividend or a pending trade, and the reliable human response to two numbers is to believe the higher one. If you are still choosing, the round-up of net worth tracker apps sorts them by what each is built for rather than by rank.

A routine that survives contact with real life

Consolidation is not a project you finish. The reason most multi-broker tracking decays is that it was set up during a burst of enthusiasm and then required that same enthusiasm every month. These five steps are the smallest set that still holds up a year later.

1. List every institution first, on paper, before you open any tool. Old employer retirement plans and a brokerage you opened for one trade are the two that get forgotten, and they are also the two most likely to hold non-covered lots.
2. Pick a fixed day of the month and use only that day. Comparing a reading taken today against one taken three weeks into the previous month measures the calendar as much as the portfolio.
3. Record what you paid, not only what it is worth. Current value is what every app shows by default; basis is what determines whether a gain is real and what you will owe on it.
4. Look through your funds at least once a year. This is the only step that catches duplicate exposure, and annually is enough because allocation drifts slowly.
5. Save the final statement whenever you close or transfer an account. It is the record nobody else is keeping for you.

What you do with the consolidated view then depends on which question you are asking. Current value answers what you have; closed positions answer what your decisions actually earned, which is a different question and one most dashboards in this category do not put in front of you. Our own answer to it is on the features page.