How to Track Investments Across Multiple Brokerages

You might have a stocks and shares ISA with one broker and a SIPP with another. A workplace pension you barely look at. Perhaps a 401(k) and a Roth IRA, a general trading account, and a bit of crypto on an exchange. Each platform shows you its own performance figure, presented its own way. None of them talk to each other.

You open five different apps, read five different numbers, add them up in your head, and decide you are doing fine. You are probably wrong. Not because you are bad at maths, but because performance across multiple accounts does not add up the way it looks like it should. To track investments properly you have to do something none of the platforms do for you: combine them correctly.

This guide is about how to track all your investments in one place and read the result honestly. It covers why consolidating performance is harder than it sounds, which metrics actually matter (and which you can ignore), the tools that do the job from spreadsheets to dedicated platforms, the quirks of UK and US account types, and a quarterly system that takes under an hour. Your investments are one slice of your wider finances, so it pairs naturally with tracking your net worth over time.

Tracking investments across brokerages is not difficult. It is just not automatic. Nobody does it for you by default, which is exactly why most people get it wrong.

Why tracking investments across accounts is harder than it sounds

The first problem is that no two brokers report performance the same way. One shows your total return since you opened the account. Another shows a time-weighted figure that strips out your deposits. A third just shows gain and loss in pounds or dollars, with no rate at all. Put three of those numbers side by side and you are not comparing like with like. You are comparing three different questions, each answered by a different platform that never expected you to hold accounts anywhere else.

Account types pile on more complexity. A tax-advantaged account (an ISA, a SIPP, a 401(k), a Roth IRA) sits in a different context to a taxable brokerage account, and a pound inside one is not always worth the same as a pound inside another. Currency adds a further layer. Hold US shares inside a sterling account and your performance quietly includes the dollar moving against the pound, whether you wanted that exposure or not.

Then there are dividends. Some platforms reinvest them automatically and fold them into your return. Some pay them out as cash and leave them out of the headline figure. And underneath all of it sits the consolidation problem itself: you cannot simply average the percentages from accounts of different sizes and expect a meaningful answer. That single mistake deserves its own section, because almost everyone makes it.

The just-add-the-percentages trap

Here is the mistake in numbers. Imagine two accounts. Account A holds £10,000 and is up 20%, so it is now worth £12,000. Account B holds £50,000 and is up 2%, so it is now worth £51,000. What is your overall return?

The instinct is to average the two percentages: 20% and 2% gives 11%. That number is completely wrong. Add the real values instead. You hold £63,000 against £60,000 invested, a gain of £3,000, which is a 5% return. Not 11%. The larger account dominates, because returns have to be weighted by how much money each one holds. Your big, boring account matters far more than your small, exciting one.

It gets worse once you add deposits and withdrawals during the year, which is the normal state of affairs for anyone paying into a pension or topping up an ISA each month. People genuinely believe they are beating the market when they are trailing it, or panic that they are losing when they are fine. The headline percentages lie, and they lie in both directions.

What you actually need to track (and what you can ignore)

Before the how, settle the what. A good investment tracker, whether it is a spreadsheet or an app, needs to show you a short list of things:

• Total portfolio value. The headline number, every account combined into one figure.
• Total gain or loss. The absolute amount you have made or lost in cash terms, after accounting for everything you have paid in.
• Rate of return. The percentage. But which percentage matters enormously, which is the whole of the next section.
• Asset allocation. How much sits in shares, bonds, cash, crypto and property across every account at once, not split up per platform where you cannot see the shape of it.
• Cost basis. What you actually paid for each holding. This is the figure tax bills are built on, so it matters most in taxable accounts.
• Income. Dividends and interest received. Forgotten more often than anything else on this list, and a real part of your return.

What can you ignore? Most of the daily noise. The minute-by-minute moves of any single account do not matter to a long-term picture, and neither do individual stock positions unless you are actively trading them. You also do not need a separate benchmark for every account. One benchmark for the whole portfolio is enough, and far more useful. Track less, but track the right things.

Time-weighted return vs money-weighted return

This is the part almost nobody is taught, and it explains how two people holding the exact same investments can honestly report different performance. There are two ways to measure a return, they answer different questions, and confusing them is behind most of the bad conclusions people draw about how they are doing.

Time-weighted return (TWR). This measures how the investment itself performed, with the effect of your deposits and withdrawals stripped out. It is the figure funds and indices report, and it is the right one to use when you compare yourself to a benchmark. The time-weighted return answers a clean question: how did my investments do, regardless of when I happened to add money?

Money-weighted return (MWR). Also called the internal rate of return, this measures your personal return, including the timing of every pound you put in or took out. Add money just before a rally and your money-weighted return flatters you. Add it just before a fall and it punishes you. It answers a more personal question: how did I do, including my own timing decisions?

Picture how they pull apart. You invest £10,000 in January. By June the market is up 10%, so your pot is worth £11,000. In July you add another £40,000, taking it to £51,000. Then the market falls 5% by December, leaving you with £48,450. This is also why drip-feeding money in regularly changes the story: timing is baked into what you actually earn.

You put in £50,000 and you are holding £48,450. You are down about £1,550. The time-weighted return is positive: 1.10 multiplied by 0.95 gives 1.045, a 4.5% gain, because the investment did fine over both halves of the year. The money-weighted return is negative, because most of your money (the £40,000) only started working in July, right before the fall. Same portfolio, same year, two honest numbers that disagree. If you want the full mechanics with the arithmetic laid out, we have a separate guide on how to calculate time-weighted returns.

Which should you use? Both, for different jobs. Use the time-weighted return when you want to judge your investments or compare them to an index, because it ignores the noise of your contributions. Use the money-weighted return when you want an honest look at your own decisions, timing included. Money-weighted vs time-weighted is not a question of which is correct. They are both correct. They simply answer different things, and a good tracker shows you each.

Simple return vs annualised return

One more distinction, simpler than the last. The simple return is total gain divided by what you paid: make £2,000 on £20,000 and your simple return is 10%. That is fine for a single, short period. It falls apart the moment you try to compare periods of different lengths.

To do that you need the annualised return, the compound annual growth rate. Say £10,000 grew to £13,310 over three years. The simple return is 33.1%, but the annualised return is 10%, because 1.10 multiplied by itself three times gives 1.331. That 10% is the number you can hold up against a fund quoting its annual performance, or against last year's result. You can work it out with any investment performance calculator or a single spreadsheet formula, but the principle matters more than the tool: never compare a three-month return to a two-year one without annualising both first.

Why your broker's performance number might be misleading

Even within a single account, the performance figure on the dashboard can flatter or mislead, in the same way that your bank's built-in tools only show half the picture. A few of the common ways it happens:

• Cash drag goes uncounted. If your account holds uninvested cash, some platforms quietly leave it out of the performance calculation, which makes the invested part look better than your money as a whole did.
• Fees are excluded. Some dashboards show a gross return, before platform charges and fund fees. Your real, net return is lower, sometimes by more than you would guess.
• Start dates differ. Since inception means one thing for the account you opened in 2015 and another for the one you opened last spring. Lined up together, the comparison is meaningless.
• Currency is bundled in. A US holding up 5% in dollars is not up 5% in your pocket if the pound strengthened 3% against the dollar over the same stretch. Some brokers show you the local-currency return, some the home-currency one, and they can be very different.
• Dividends are handled inconsistently. A 7% total return with a 3% dividend yield looks like a 4% price return if the income is left out. Total return and price return are not the same animal, and platforms are not always clear which one you are looking at.

Method one: the spreadsheet

If you want full control and understand every number, a spreadsheet is hard to beat. Whether you track investments in Excel or in Google Sheets, the setup is the same. Build a master sheet with one row per holding and columns for the account, the platform, the account type (ISA, SIPP, 401(k), taxable), the current value, the cost basis, the gain or loss, and the asset class.

Update it monthly, not daily, or you will drive yourself round the bend. From those columns you can total your portfolio value, calculate a properly weighted return, and see your real asset allocation across everything at once. Live prices can be pulled in with the GOOGLEFINANCE function in Sheets or a stock data type in Excel, which saves a lot of typing.

The upside is real: it is free, endlessly customisable, and you trust the output because you built it. The downside is just as real. Manual entry is slow, it is easy to fat-finger a number, and a spreadsheet will not calculate a true time-weighted return unless you build that logic in yourself. For many people it is the right place to start and the wrong place to stay.

Method two: free tracking tools

A handful of free tools sit one step up from a spreadsheet. Google Finance offers a basic portfolio tracker that is good for watching prices and poor at total-return maths, with no awareness of account types. Yahoo Finance does much the same with slightly richer portfolio features, which is why the Yahoo Finance portfolio tracker is one of the most-searched free options going.

In the UK, the FT Portfolio Tracker from the Financial Times handles funds and shares well and is a common choice for that reason. But every free portfolio tracker shares the same ceiling. They do not track your cash flows, they do not calculate a real time-weighted return, they have no concept of tax lots, and they cannot see your pension or retirement accounts at all. Fine for a watchlist. Not enough for the whole picture.

Method three: dedicated portfolio trackers

Then there are tools built for exactly this. Empower, which absorbed the old Personal Capital, is a free dashboard popular in the US for pulling 401(k) and brokerage accounts into one view. Sharesight is a favourite among self-directed investors because it handles dividends and tax reporting properly and supports multiple currencies. Portfolio Performance is a free, open-source desktop application that calculates both time-weighted and money-weighted returns correctly. Kubera is a paid tracker that reaches further, taking in crypto wallets, property estimates and bank balances alongside your shares.

When you weigh up any investment tracking platform, the same checklist applies. Does it link accounts automatically or make you enter everything by hand? Does it calculate a true time-weighted return, not just a gain figure? Does it support more than one currency? Does it understand tax lots, and can it see retirement accounts? The gap between tools is almost entirely in those five answers.

Method four: the hybrid approach

Most experienced individual investors land somewhere in the middle, and it is worth copying. Keep using each broker's own app for what it is good at: trading, rebalancing, managing the individual account. Then use one consolidation tool, an app or a spreadsheet, for the big picture: total portfolio value, asset allocation, and your overall return across the lot.

Update the consolidation layer monthly. Compare the whole portfolio to a single benchmark once a quarter. That is it. You get the control of managing each account directly and the clarity of one honest number on top, without pretending any single platform can be both.

UK: ISAs, SIPPs and workplace pensions

A stocks and shares ISA is usually tracked well by the broker that holds it. The challenge is combining several. One rule worth getting straight, because it changed: until April 2024 you could only pay into one stocks and shares ISA per tax year, so people often held several old ones with different providers. That restriction has gone. Under the rules in force since 6 April 2024, you can now pay into more than one ISA of the same type in the same year, as long as your total contributions stay within the £20,000 annual allowance (the Lifetime ISA is the exception, still one per year). Either way, you may well hold ISAs across more than one platform, and they will not combine themselves.

A SIPP, a self-invested personal pension, is often held with a different broker again. You track it like any other investment account, with one wrinkle worth remembering. Its value includes tax relief. Basic-rate relief tops up an £8,000 contribution to £10,000, so the cost basis from your own pocket is £8,000, not £10,000. Mixing those up will overstate what you actually put in.

Workplace pensions are the black box. Many of the big providers show you fund names and a current value and very little else, with no clear performance since you joined. Getting usable data out can mean a manual CSV export or a fair bit of squinting. The practical answer is to combine your ISA, SIPP and workplace pension values once a month and treat that total as your investment portfolio. Your current account and savings balances are a separate matter.

US: 401(k), IRA, Roth IRA and brokerage accounts

The US picture rhymes with the UK one. A 401(k) or 403(b) is an employer plan with a limited menu of funds, and the quality of its reporting depends entirely on the plan administrator, which makes it one of the harder accounts to pull data from. A traditional IRA works much like a SIPP, tax-deferred, and if you have made any non-deductible contributions you need to track that cost basis carefully.

A Roth IRA is funded with after-tax money and grows tax-free, which makes tracking it simple but introduces a quieter point: a Roth is worth more than a traditional account of the same face value, because none of it is owed back in tax. A taxable brokerage account gives you the best reporting of the lot, though tax-lot tracking matters here (whether you sell first-in-first-out or pick specific lots changes your bill). Treat your 401(k), IRA, Roth and brokerage together as your investment portfolio, kept apart from your checking and savings, and the whole thing feeds straight into retirement planning that uses your real numbers.

Everywhere: crypto, property and other assets

Crypto is its own headache. Held across exchanges and wallets, with coins bought at different prices, staking rewards trickling in, and chain swaps muddying the record, it is genuinely hard to track cleanly. Dedicated tools like CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap help on the crypto side, and a portfolio tracker for crypto will value the holdings, but folding that into your traditional investments is where most people give up. The honest move is to value it at the current market price and include it in the total, while knowing it is the volatile, fiddly corner.

Property and other assets need a different treatment. If you own a buy-to-let or hold REITs, include the estimated value in your net worth, but be careful about dropping it into investment performance, because property is valued by estimate, not marked to market every day. The same caution applies to peer-to-peer lending, angel investments and collectibles. Carry them at cost until there is a clear market value, and keep them out of your return calculation unless you can value them reliably. A number you made up does not become true by going in a spreadsheet.

The quarterly review: a practical framework

Here is a system you can actually keep. Four times a year, in January, April, July and October, sit down and work through the same short routine:

1. Log into each account and note the current value.
2. Note any contributions or withdrawals since the last review.
3. Update your consolidation spreadsheet or app.
4. Calculate total portfolio value, total gain or loss, and your estimated return.
5. Check your asset allocation against your target split.
6. Compare your total portfolio return to one benchmark, a single number against a single number.
7. Decide whether anything needs rebalancing, and act only if it does.

The whole thing takes 30 to 60 minutes. Call it two to four hours a year for a clear, honest view of how your investments are doing, which is a remarkable return on time. If you are working towards a specific target, such as a FIRE number, that quarterly snapshot is also how you know whether you are on track or drifting.

What to compare against: choosing a benchmark

Do not give each account its own benchmark. That way lies confusion and a great deal of self-flattery. Pick one benchmark for the whole portfolio. For most people a global equity index is the standard choice: MSCI World, the FTSE Global All Cap, or a fund that tracks them such as VT in the US or VWRL in the UK. If you hold a meaningful slug of bonds, compare against a 60/40 blend or whatever matches your target allocation instead.

The aim is not to beat the benchmark. The aim is to find out whether your active decisions, the stock picks, the timing, the clever allocation, added value or quietly subtracted it compared with just buying the index. If you consistently trail it, that is not a failure. That is one of the most useful things you can learn about your own investing, and it points to a simpler, cheaper strategy.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

1. Tracking too often. Checking daily does not improve returns. It raises your anxiety and tempts you into bad decisions. Quarterly is plenty for a long-term portfolio.
2. Cherry-picking accounts. Admiring the ISA that is up 30% while ignoring the pension that is down 5% is not tracking, it is flattering yourself. Count everything or you are not measuring anything.
3. Ignoring fees. A 0.5% platform fee plus a 0.2% fund charge is a 0.7% drag every year. Compounded over 20 years, that leaves you with roughly 13% less than you would otherwise have had. Take fees off your return, not out of sight.
4. Mixing contributions with returns. Your pot went from £50,000 to £60,000. Good. But if you paid in £8,000 along the way, your actual gain is £2,000 on £50,000, about 4%, not the 20% the headline jump suggests.
5. Forgetting currency. If you hold dollar investments and track in pounds, the exchange rate is part of your return whether you like it or not. Do not pretend it is not there.
6. Comparing the wrong period. My portfolio is up 15% means nothing without a since when. Since 2020? Since last Tuesday? For anything longer than a year, use the annualised return so the comparison is fair.

How Endute fits in

The hybrid approach needs a consolidation layer that does the hard parts for you. That is the job Endute is built for, and it lines up closely with everything above.

Time-weighted and money-weighted return, worked out for you. Endute calculates both for your portfolio, so you can see how your investments performed and how you performed, the two numbers from the section above, without building the maths yourself.

One portfolio across every account and currency. Your ISA, your brokerage account and your dollar shares end up in one weighted figure rather than five apps, which is the same logic behind a proper personal net worth view.

Dividends counted, benchmarks built in. Dividend income is tracked rather than dropped, so your total return is the real one, and you can compare the whole portfolio against a benchmark in a single view instead of guessing.

Investments inside your whole financial picture. Because Endute also handles your spending, budgets and net worth, your investment performance report sits next to everything else, not stranded in a separate tool. That is the difference between checking a number and understanding it.

The bottom line

Tracking investments across multiple brokerages is not hard. It is just not done for you. The minimum viable system is one spreadsheet or app, updated once a quarter, showing total value, total return and asset allocation across everything you own.

Hold on to the one idea that does the most work. Time-weighted return tells you how your investments performed. Money-weighted return tells you how you performed. Both are true, and you need both. Beyond that, do not overcomplicate it. A 30-minute quarterly review beats a daily obsession with five broker apps, every time, and it closes the hidden cost of not actually knowing your numbers.

Common questions about tracking investments

How do I track all my investments in one place?

Pick one consolidation layer: a spreadsheet, a dedicated portfolio tracker, or a personal finance app that links accounts. Record each holding with its account, value and cost basis, update it monthly or quarterly, and let that single view show your total value, weighted return and asset allocation. The brokers stay where they are; you just stop relying on any one of them for the full picture.

What is the difference between time-weighted and money-weighted return?

Time-weighted return measures how the investment performed, with your deposits and withdrawals stripped out, which is why it is the right figure for comparing against a benchmark. Money-weighted return (the internal rate of return) includes the timing of your cash flows, so it reflects how you personally did. Add money just before a fall and the two numbers can point in opposite directions, and both are correct.

Can I track a 401(k) and an ISA in the same portfolio tracker?

Yes, as long as the tracker supports both markets and multiple currencies. Many US-only tools cannot see UK accounts and vice versa, so check coverage first. Whatever you use, treat all your retirement and investment accounts as one portfolio for the purpose of measuring return, and keep your day-to-day cash separate.

How often should I check my investment portfolio?

For a long-term portfolio, once a quarter is enough to stay informed without inviting bad decisions. Daily checking does not improve returns and tends to increase anxiety and trading. A short quarterly review of value, return and allocation gives you everything you need.

Why does my broker's performance number look different from my actual return?

Usually because of what the broker includes or leaves out. Some exclude uninvested cash, some show returns before fees, some bundle in or strip out currency moves, and some report price return without dividends. Different start dates and different methods (time-weighted versus a simple gain) also pull the figures apart. Recalculating against the mid-market value yourself, or in a consolidation tool, is the only way to know your true number.

What is the best free portfolio tracker?

It depends on what you need. For watching prices, Google Finance and Yahoo Finance are fine and free. For correct return calculations, the open-source Portfolio Performance app is strong, and in the US the free Empower dashboard links accounts well. The free tools tend to fall short on cash-flow tracking, tax lots and retirement accounts, which is where paid or purpose-built platforms earn their keep.

This article is for general information and is not financial or tax advice. Tax rules, allowances and account features change, and the right approach depends on your own circumstances, so confirm the current position with your provider or a qualified adviser before acting. For free, impartial guidance, the government-backed MoneyHelper service is a good starting point.