Step 4 of 13
Your trade history
The ledger behind your positions: buys, sells, splits — and what Quantic does when it's incomplete.
Movements is your buy/sell history, and it's the authority for any position built from it. Your holdings aren't stored separately — they're recalculated from these trades every time one changes. Delete a trade and the position re-derives itself immediately.
A buy's commission counts towards what the shares cost you, so it raises your average cost — that's how cost basis is defined for tax almost everywhere. A commission on a sale doesn't: it reduces your proceeds, which is a separate calculation, so it's recorded and left alone. Quantic reads commissions out of IBKR statements for you.
Stock splits are a third kind of entry. Record one with its ratio and Quantic rescales your shares and your average cost together, so the position's value doesn't change. No broker export reports splits, so this one is always by hand.
Spin-offs are the fourth, and the one most tools get wrong. A company hands you shares in a business it is separating out; your original share count doesn't move, but part of what you paid for it now belongs to the new company. Quantic asks you for that split — the percentage the company publishes — because nobody can derive it honestly from a price feed. Skip it and the new shares look free, so all of an eventual sale reads as gain.
All of that care about what your shares cost you pays off at the sale. When a position's trades add up to no shares left, it doesn't vanish — it moves to Closed positions on your portfolio page, with what it came to, how long you held it and what it paid you in dividends along the way. Sell part of a position and the same figure appears beside the part you kept.
Those results are worked out from your average cost, and Quantic says so on the page. It's a measure of how the position did — not a tax return. Most European tax rules, Spain's included, match each sale to specific purchases in the order you bought them, which can give a different number. Results also stay in the currency the shares traded in and are never converted, because the exchange rate that applied on the day of a sale years ago isn't something Quantic knows.
If a position's trades sell more shares than they ever bought, Quantic says so instead of quietly guessing. It usually means a missing earlier purchase, a statement that starts mid-history, or an unrecorded split.
Key terms
- Commission
- What your broker charges to execute a trade. It's small per trade but it's real money, and it counts as part of what the shares cost you — which is why Quantic records the commission on every trade it can read from your statement.
- Stock split
- A company dividing each existing share into several — a 4-for-1 split turns 1 share into 4, each worth a quarter as much. Your position is worth exactly the same before and after; only the number of pieces changes. Dividends per share fall by the same ratio, so your income is unaffected too.
- Reverse split
- The opposite of a split: several shares merged into one, so a 1-for-3 reverse split turns 3 shares into 1 worth three times as much. Value is preserved, but companies often do it to lift a low share price above an exchange's minimum — so it can be worth asking why it happened.
- Spin-off
- A company handing its shareholders shares in a business it is separating out — you wake up owning two companies instead of one, without buying anything. Your original share count doesn't change, but part of what you paid for it now belongs to the new company: the two split the cost basis in proportion to what each was worth on the day. The company publishes that split (often as "Form 8937"), and it matters, because whatever isn't allocated to the new shares shows up as pure gain when you sell them.
- Realized result
- What a sale actually came to: what you received for the shares, less the commission, less what those shares had cost you. It's called a result rather than a gain because it is just as often negative — selling below your average cost is an ordinary part of investing, not a mistake to hide. Until you sell, a position's rise or fall is unrealized: real on paper, but nothing has happened yet.
Once a mapping works, give it a name and Quantic keeps it. Next month's statement from the same broker arrives already filled in, so importing becomes a single click — and if you'd rather not work the columns out yourself, there's a button that offers a guess for you to check. It's optional, and it only ever sends the names of your columns and the shape of their values, never the values.
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