DEGIRO sends an annual statement early in the year with your balance and the total value of your investments. Useful for your tax return, but it does not answer the question most investors have: what did I actually make?
For that you need a different file, and this is where it goes wrong. DEGIRO offers three statements, and the difference between them decides whether your return calculation holds up.
Three statements, three purposes
| Statement | What it contains | Use for |
|---|---|---|
| Annual statement | Balance and total value at year end | Tax filing |
| Account statement | All activity: buys, sells, dividends, costs, deposits, withdrawals, corporate actions | Calculating return and importing |
| Transactions | Buys and sells only | A quick view of your trading |
To calculate your return or import into a tracker, take the account statement, not the transaction list.
Why the transaction list skews your return
The transaction list holds only your buys and sells. What it omits is exactly what drives your return: dividends received, withholding tax, transaction and connectivity fees, currency conversion costs, and your deposits and withdrawals.
That last one is the quietest error. Without deposits and withdrawals, no tool can know how much money was present when, so no money-weighted return can be calculated. See Calculating your portfolio's real return. A tracker that only knows your trades will still display a number. It looks complete and it is not.
Downloading the account statement
- Log in to DEGIRO and confirm the login in the app.
- In the left navigation click Inbox, then Account statement.
- Set the start date before your very first deposit. This is the step that matters most; start later and your history has no correct beginning.
- Set the end date to today.
- Click export on the right and choose CSV.
Keep that file. Next time you only need the new period, since most trackers recognise and skip duplicate rows.
What you are looking at
The statement runs chronologically with date and time, product name and ISIN, quantity, price, currency, costs and total per row. A few row types raise questions:
- Currency movements. Buying a US share from a euro account produces a separate conversion row. Not an extra trade, just the other side of the entry.
- Corporate actions. Splits, mergers and name changes appear as their own rows. They change your quantity without making you better off, and they are the most common reason a long-running spreadsheet stops adding up.
- Dividend and withholding tax appear as two separate rows, gross and deduction. Count only the first and you overstate your income.
What DEGIRO does not show
The platform is built for trading, not analysis. It will not give you your return over a period of your choosing corrected for deposits, which positions actually drove that result in percentage points, your spread across sector, country, currency or exchange, a benchmark comparison, or your investments alongside the rest of your wealth.
That is not a flaw, it is a different job. Which is why so many Dutch investors export their account statement into something else.
Then what?
You can build a spreadsheet, which works until you open a second account or meet your first share split. Or you can import it.
In Gylder the account statement is read for positions, costs, dividends and cashflows, giving you your money-weighted return, your weight per position and your spread, with your investments sitting alongside your property, mortgage and savings rather than on their own.