Starting Your Portfolio from a Brokerage Statement
Your holdings show gains, but your broker's Total Equity tells a different story. Here is how to set up Assetick so every number reconciles with your statement — and the two traps almost everyone hits.
The puzzle: gains on screen, but equity going nowhere
Here is a situation that confuses almost every investor at some point. Your portfolio tracker shows your four holdings are up. Green numbers. And yet the monthly statement from your brokerage house shows Total Equity barely moving — or falling.
Neither number is wrong. They are answering different questions.
A holdings view answers: how are the shares I currently own doing against what I paid for them? Your brokerage statement answers a bigger question: how much is this whole account worth? — and that includes your cash ledger, every fee you ever paid, and every loss you ever locked in by selling.
Total Equity = your cash ledger balance + the market value of your shares. Past losses and fees live in the cash side — invisible in a holdings view.
A worked example. Suppose over the years you deposited ৳3,00,000 and withdrew ৳1,00,000, paying ৳3,500 in fees along the way — a net deposit of ৳1,96,500. Today your shares are worth ৳1,75,000 and your cash ledger reads −৳12,000 (you have spent slightly more on shares than you had in cash). Total Equity: ৳1,63,000.
The gap between what you put in (৳1,96,500) and what you have (৳1,63,000) is ৳33,500 — the sum of every realized loss and every unrealized one. Your current holdings might be up ৳8,000 this month, and Total Equity still sits underwater, because history does not disappear when you sell a losing share.
Assetick's portfolio is built exactly like the brokerage statement — cash ledger, deposits, withdrawals, fees, realized and unrealized P&L, Total Equity. Which means it can match your broker's numbers to the taka. But only if you start it correctly.
The fresh-start recipe: three steps
You do not need to reconstruct years of trading history. You need one document: your latest brokerage portfolio statement (every broker issues one — RBSL, LankaBangla, IDLC, all of them follow the same layout).
Note its date ("As On"). Everything before this date will be summarised in one snapshot; everything after it, Assetick tracks trade by trade.
Copy five numbers straight from the statement:
As-of date — the statement date.
Cash / ledger balance — often negative; that is normal.
Total deposits and total withdrawals to date.
Fees & charges to date.
Realized gain/loss to date — negative if you have locked in losses.
New trades go in the transaction form. New deposits, withdrawals, fees and dividends go in the Cash ledger (the link on the Account Status card). That is the whole system.
Do this and your Assetick statement — Total Equity, Net Deposit, Net Gain/Loss — reproduces your broker's figures from day one, then stays current between statements.
The two traps (read this part twice)
Trap one: the settings fields describe the past — they never move your cash
A month after setup, your broker charges a ৳500 CDBL fee. The natural instinct is to open settings and increase "fees before start" by 500. Nothing happens — cash balance unchanged, equity unchanged.
That is by design. Your opening cash balance, copied from the statement, already contains the effect of every past fee. If the fees field also subtracted from cash, every fee would be counted twice. The settings fields are a snapshot of history, entered once.
Anything that happens after your start date goes in the Cash ledger — never in settings.
For that new ৳500 fee: Account Status card → Cash ledger → add a Fee entry. Cash drops by 500, equity drops by 500, and the fees total updates. Exactly what you expected — through the right door.
Trap two: if you seed your current holdings, adjust the opening cash
Your statement lists shares you still hold. To see them in Assetick, enter each one as a BUY dated the statement date, at the statement's Average Rate.
But here is the trap: those buy entries subtract their cost from your cash — while the statement's ledger balance already reflects that money being spent. Enter both as-is and the cost is double-counted; your cash balance lands far too negative.
The correction is one addition:
Opening cash = the statement's ledger balance + the total cost of the holdings you seed.
Example: ledger balance −৳12,000, and you seed holdings whose total cost is ৳1,80,000. Enter opening cash as ৳1,68,000. After Assetick subtracts your seeded buys, cash lands back at −৳12,000 — matching the statement.
One smaller detail: the statement's Average Rate already includes the broker's commission. So for the seed entries, keep the portfolio's commission setting at 0% — the rates you are typing are already all-inclusive. If you set a commission rate for future trades, expect the seeded positions to drift by a few taka; for exact reconciliation, seed at 0% first, verify the match, then set your rate.
What you get for the ten minutes this takes
A portfolio page that reads like your brokerage statement, always current: Equity Status and Account Status cards, holdings with saleable quantity (DSE settlement — A/B/N category shares clear in two trading days, Z in three), and a cash ledger you control.
Plus things your broker's PDF will never show you: a true equity curve— your account's actual value through time, deposits appearing as steps, drawn from the positions you really held on each day, not a back-projection. Risk metrics computed on it, including Beta against the DSEX. And one line we are particularly fond of: how much your broker has earned from you in commission and fees, sitting right next to your own net gain or loss. Sometimes that comparison is the most educational number on the page.
Up to three portfolios per account — one per BO account if you use multiple brokerage houses — each with its own commission rates and its own statement.
No credit card required