Multiple Brokerage Accounts, One Honest View
Your real portfolio is split across brokers, and none of them show the whole thing. Here is how to combine every account into one live-priced view.
Most people don't have a brokerage account — they have three. A taxable account at one broker, a Roth at another, some shares in an old employer plan. Each app shows you a tidy total, and every one of those totals is incomplete.
Why one broker can't show the whole picture
A brokerage only knows about the assets it custodies. That is not a flaw; it is just the boundary of what it can see. The consequence is that no single login ever answers the real question: what do I own, in total, right now?
Say your holdings look like this:
- Broker A (taxable):
$42,000 - Broker B (Roth):
$31,000 - Old employer plan:
$18,000
Each app proudly shows its own number. Your actual portfolio is
$42,000 + $31,000 + $18,000 = $91,000 — a figure none of them displays.
The manual workaround, and why it rots
The usual fix is a spreadsheet that adds up the accounts. It works for exactly one afternoon. Then a price moves, a dividend reinvests, and the cost basis on one lot changes — and your combined total is wrong again. Keeping it current is the same losing game as any spreadsheet.
Warning
Combining accounts by hand also makes it easy to double-count. The same ETF held at two brokers is one line in your head but two rows in a sheet — and one of them usually has a stale price.
One view that stays current
What you want is a single deck that holds positions from every account and prices them together, so the total is honest on every load. You enter each holding once — no broker logins to hand over — and the combined, live-priced view does the adding up for you.