Hargreaves Lansdown Portfolio Tracker: The Complete Guide

Hargreaves Lansdown is the largest DIY investment platform in the UK, and for good reason: the account view is clear, the research is decent, and holding an ISA, a SIPP and a Fund & Share Account under one login is genuinely convenient. What HL does not give you is a proper Hargreaves Lansdown portfolio tracker: one view of everything you own across those accounts, measured against a benchmark, with your dividend income, sector concentration and risk laid out in a way you can act on. This guide covers how to get your data out of HL, what the export does and does not contain, and how to turn it into analysis that the HL account pages will never show you.

Why the HL Account View Is Not a Portfolio Tracker

Open your HL account and you see each account separately: its value, its cash balance, and a list of holdings with today's gain or loss. That is an account statement, not portfolio analysis. Three things are missing for anyone who wants to understand how they are actually doing.

• No whole-portfolio view. An ISA, a SIPP and a Fund & Share Account are shown as three lists. If you hold Legal & General in two of them, nothing adds those positions together or tells you what share of your total wealth sits in one company.
• No benchmark. HL shows what a holding has gained since you bought it. It does not tell you whether that beat a FTSE All-Share tracker over the same period, which is the only question that says whether picking stocks has been worth the effort.
• No risk lens. Sector concentration, how much of your income depends on two or three payers, how far the portfolio fell in the last drawdown: none of it is on the page.

None of this is a criticism of HL as a place to hold investments. It is a broker, and it does the broker's job well. Tracking is a separate layer, and the way to build it is to get your transaction history out and into a tool designed for the purpose.

How to Export Your Hargreaves Lansdown Data

HL does not offer an API, so the route is the transaction history download. It takes a couple of minutes per account.

• Log in at hl.co.uk and open the account you want to export (ISA, SIPP or Fund & Share).
• Go to the Transaction history section of that account.
• Set the date range to cover all of your purchases, not just the current tax year. A tracker that only knows about the last twelve months cannot calculate your true return.
• Use the Download / Export option and choose CSV. If your account page only shows a table, copy it into Excel and save it as .xlsx or .csv. Both work.
• Repeat for each account. HL exports one account at a time.

Two quirks of the HL file are worth knowing before you do anything with it. First, HL quotes UK share prices in pence, so a purchase of Unilever at 4,120 appears as 4120, not 41.20. Any spreadsheet or tracker you feed the file into needs to know that, or every UK holding will be valued a hundred times too high. Second, HL exports do not include ticker codes. Each row names the holding ("Legal & General Group plc") but carries no LGEN, so whatever reads the file has to match holdings by name.

Skip the spreadsheet

Import your HL export straight into Openbook

Drop the CSV or Excel file in as it downloaded. Openbook works out which column is which, treats UK prices as pence, matches each holding by name with a stock picker to confirm, and shows you what it read before anything is saved.

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What the HL Export Contains

The transaction history file is a list of every deal and cash movement in the account over the date range you chose: buys, sells, dividends, fund distributions, fees and deposits, each with a date, the holding's name, quantity, price and total amount. It is the raw material for everything a tracker does, and it is more complete than most people expect.

What it is not is a portfolio. To get from a list of transactions to "here is what I own and what it is worth", something has to replay every buy and sell, net them into current positions, and price those positions today. Doing that by hand in a spreadsheet is possible, and the next section covers it, but it is the part that most DIY trackers get subtly wrong: partial sells, corporate actions, fund units bought at different prices, and pence-versus-pounds mistakes all creep in.

Building a Hargreaves Lansdown Spreadsheet

If you want to stay in Excel or Google Sheets, the workable structure is one tab per account plus a summary tab.

• Paste each account's export into its own tab, keeping the date, name, quantity, price and amount columns.
• Add a column that converts pence prices to pounds for UK shares (divide by 100) and leaves fund prices, which HL quotes in pounds, alone.
• Use a pivot table to sum quantity by holding name, which gives you current positions once sells are entered as negative quantities.
• Pull a current price for each holding with a lookup, and multiply out for current value.
• On the summary tab, sum each holding across accounts to see your true concentration.

This works, and plenty of investors run exactly this. Its weakness is maintenance. Every month you re-export, re-paste, and fix whatever the new rows broke. There is no benchmark unless you add one, no dividend calendar, and no view of risk. Our guide to choosing a UK portfolio tracker goes through where the spreadsheet stops being worth the time.

What a Proper Tracker Shows That HL Cannot

Once the transaction history is loaded into a dedicated tool, the questions that HL cannot answer become one screen each.

• Performance against a benchmark. Your whole-portfolio return over one, three and five years next to the index you could have bought instead. This is the number that decides whether your process is working.
• Income. Dividends received by month and by holding, and the yield on what you actually paid rather than today's price. Our dividend tracker guide explains why yield on cost is the figure that matters for income investors.
• Concentration. How much of the portfolio sits in one sector, one country, or one company once the ISA and SIPP are added together. HL customers are often far more concentrated in UK financials and consumer staples than they realise.
• Reward and Risk on every holding. Openbook scores UK and US-listed companies on Growth, Momentum, Profitability and Valuation for Reward, and Volatility, Financial Solvency, Operational Quality and Size for Risk, so you can see at a glance which of your holdings the numbers support and which are running on hope. The methodology sets out exactly how.
• Drawdown history. How far the portfolio fell from its peak in each market wobble, which is the honest measure of how much risk you have been carrying.

No card required

Set the analytics layer up once

Create a free Openbook account, import your HL accounts, and the analysis is there each time you log in. Re-import a fresh export whenever you deal, and the picture updates with it.

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Common Problems with HL Exports and How to Fix Them

A few things trip people up the first time.

• Holdings not recognised. Because the file has no tickers, a holding named slightly differently from its listed name may not match automatically. Openbook's preview lets you pick the right stock from a search before anything is saved.
• UK values a hundred times too big. The pence problem. Check that whatever you use knows HL quotes UK shares in pence; in Openbook the "LSE prices in pence" box is ticked when you choose Hargreaves Lansdown in the import.
• Fund units. HL funds (OEICs and unit trusts) are priced in pounds and have no ticker at all. They match by fund name, and prices come through daily rather than live.
• Missing early history. If the date range did not go back far enough, positions will look smaller than they are. Re-export with a wider range; the import will show you the totals to check against your HL account page.

Taking Your HL Analysis Further

The point of getting the data out of HL is not to build a prettier statement. It is to answer the questions that decide what you do next: whether to keep picking stocks or move more into a tracker, whether your income is dependent on too few payers, and whether the risk you are running is the risk you meant to run. With the export in a tracker, those become five-minute checks instead of an afternoon in Excel.

For investors holding names like Legal & General (LGEN), Unilever (ULVR) or Hargreaves Lansdown itself (HL.), seeing how each contributes to overall return and risk, and how the scores on each holding compare with the rest of the market, is the kind of analysis that changes decisions. Read our guide on tracking investment performance for the measures worth watching, or if you also hold accounts elsewhere, the same import works for AJ Bell, interactive investor and Trading 212 exports, so the whole picture ends up in one place.

Next step

See what your HL portfolio is actually exposed to

Sector concentration, income by holding, drawdown history and a Reward and Risk score on every position, across your ISA, SIPP and Fund & Share Account. Bring the export; the rest is done for you.

Open your portfolio →

You can Compare HL, LGEN, ULVR side by side on Openbook, or find stocks with the screener.