The Portfolio Pit: What Did Your Investments Actually Return?

Here is a feeling most investors know well: you open your brokerage app, glance at the total, feel something between pride and mild panic, and close the app again. You didn't actually check anything. You just vibed with a number.

The problem is, the total balance is a terrible indicator of performance. It's the current market value of what you hold — not what you made, not what you lost, not what you spent getting here. It tells you where you are, not whether the decisions you made were any good.

That question takes a different kind of accounting.

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The "I think I'm up" trap

Investing is genuinely one of those areas where human memory cannot be trusted. You vividly remember the stock you bought at exactly the right moment and sold for a tidy profit. You have somehow forgotten the three others you held too long, sold at a loss, and mentally filed under "learning experiences."

The losses aren't gone — they're just unexamined.

And then there's the averaging problem. Did you buy Apple once, or did you buy it four times at four different prices? What's your actual cost basis? Most people have no idea. They guess. They feel approximately right. They're usually off by a margin that would make an accountant faint.

The only way out of the trap is the numbers. All of them. In one place.

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What Pinke finds in your Trade Republic export

When you upload a Trade Republic PDF, Pinke reads every investment transaction — buys, sells, dividends, and interest — and builds a position-by-position ledger from scratch.

The key calculation is average-cost accounting. Say you bought 10 shares of something at 90 € and then 5 more at 120 €. Your average cost is 100 € per share. When you later sell 8 shares at 130 €, your realized gain is 8 × (130 − 100) = 240 €. Not 8 × (130 − 90). Not a guess. The real number.

Pinke does this for every security across your entire statement history — automatically, without you lifting a finger beyond the upload.

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The Portfolio Pit: a tour

Four numbers at the top

The page opens with a strip of four KPI cards. Think of them as the tl;dr before the details:

• Currently Invested — the total cost basis of shares you're still holding. This is real money that's in the market and not in your pocket. Not the current value — the price you actually paid.
• Realized P&L — what you've locked in by selling. Positive means you came out ahead. Below the number: how many winning trades, how many losing ones, and the total count. The win/loss split is often more revealing than the total.
• Total Value — how much money flowed in versus how much came back out (sells + dividends + interest combined). The gap between the two is your net cash commitment to the market so far.
• Interest + Dividends — passive income from your holdings. Separated by type, because interest from your cash balance is a different beast from dividend income from a stock.

None of these numbers move with the market. They're historical — what happened, not what might happen next.

Holdings: the open positions

The holdings table shows every security you haven't fully sold. Each row has the asset class (ETF, stock, or commodity — detected automatically from the name), your average cost, the shares still held, and any dividend income received. If you sold some shares but kept others, a small partial badge appears, so you always know what you're looking at.

Click any row and a detail panel opens, showing every individual trade and dividend for that position: date, quantity, price per share, amount. If you need the ISIN — to look it up elsewhere, or for your tax software — there's a copy button right there.

The honest chart

Below the holdings is a horizontal bar chart: every position that's had at least one sell, sorted from the biggest loss on the left to the biggest gain on the right. Red bars on one side, green on the other. No decoration.

This is the chart that makes people quiet. It's one thing to know abstractly that some trades didn't work out. It's another to see them lined up in order, with the loss quantified, next to the positions that actually performed.

Not comfortable. Very useful.

Winners and Losers tables

Below the chart, two tables split your realized positions: gains on one side, losses on the other. Each row shows proceeds, cost, P&L, and any dividend income for that position. Both tables have a totals row at the bottom so the aggregate is always visible.

Yearly Activity chart

The yearly chart stacks realized P&L, interest, and dividends by year. Two lines run across it — one for winning trades that year, one for losing trades. This makes year-on-year comparison actually readable: not just "was I up or down" but "how many bets did I make, and how did they land?"

A year with 2 wins and 12 losses looks very different from a year with 2 wins and 2 losses, even if the total P&L is the same.

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What it doesn't do

The Portfolio Pit is a realized P&L view. It shows completed history, not live prices.

If you're sitting on a position that's now worth twice what you paid, the Holdings table shows your cost basis, not the current value. That would require a live market feed, which Pinke doesn't have. If you want to know your current unrealized gains, check your brokerage app — that's what it's for.

Pinke also won't tell you what to do next. There's no "sell this" or "hold that." That part stays on you. Pinke just makes sure you're starting from accurate information instead of vibes.

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A note on partial positions and multi-year histories

If you've been investing for several years and have uploaded multiple statements, Pinke handles the cross-statement accounting. Positions are tracked by ISIN, so buys from 2023 factor into the average cost used to calculate a 2025 sell.

If you've only sold part of a position, the partial badge tracks which rows have a mix of sold and held shares. The average cost for the held portion is recalculated after each partial sell.

It's not magic — it's just careful math applied to all the transactions at once.

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Getting started

Upload your Trade Republic PDF under Ingest, let Pinke analyze it, then open Portfolio from the navigation.

If you've been investing for a few years and genuinely don't know whether you came out ahead — or by how much, or which positions were the drag — it's worth finding out. The answer might be reassuring. It might be humbling. Either way, it's better than guessing.

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