Portfolio structure
Five accounts showing five numbers is not a portfolio. Here is what breaks when you add them up, and how to get to a total that means something.
Most people do not have a portfolio. They have five portfolios that do not talk to each other — a brokerage account, a crypto exchange, a self-custody wallet, a perps venue, and a spreadsheet holding whatever is left. Each shows a number. None of them shows the number.
Adding the balances together gives a figure that is wrong in ways that matter, for four reasons.
The same exposure appears twice. Hold TSLA at your broker and a tokenised TSLA in a wallet and you have one directional bet counted as two positions in two asset classes. Your true concentration is hidden by the categorisation.
Options are not their premium. A short put shows as a small credit, but it commits collateral equal to strike × 100 × contracts. Count the premium and ignore the reserve and your utilisation figure is fiction.
Cash is double-counted or missing. Collateral reserved against a short option is not free cash, though most venues still display it as a balance.
Timestamps differ. One venue marks at last trade, another at mid, a third at an hourly snapshot. Summing them produces a total that was never true at any single instant.
Aggregation is not addition; it is agreeing on definitions first. Three worth settling:
Group by underlying, not by venue. The question is never "how much is in Coinbase" — it is "how much do I have riding on BTC". Roll every instrument up to the thing it is exposed to, wherever it is held.
Use committed capital, not notional. For anything with leverage or collateral, the number that constrains you is what is actually tied up.
Keep realised and unrealised apart. Mixing them makes a good month indistinguishable from a lucky mark, and hides the fact that unrealised gains can evaporate before you touch them.
A tracker needs to see balances and history. It never needs to place an order or move funds, and any tool asking for that is asking for more than the job requires.
In practice: brokerages connect through a read-only aggregation layer where you authenticate on the broker's own page and the tracker never sees the password; wallets are tracked by public address, which by construction cannot authorise a transfer; and exchanges use API keys created without withdrawal permission. If a connection could move your money, it is over-scoped for tracking.
Concentration by underlying. The most common unpleasant surprise: three positions that look diversified across venues turn out to be the same bet in different wrappers.
Committed versus free capital. How much is genuinely deployable before something must be closed.
Net exposure across instruments. Long stock, short calls against it, and a perp hedge net to a single directional number that no individual venue can show you.
Realised P&L on a consistent basis. One FIFO treatment across everything, with the ×100 option multiplier applied, so the annual figure means something.
Worth being blunt. Prices come from third-party feeds and can be stale, wrong, or missing for illiquid instruments. Venue-reported P&L for perps and derivatives should be taken from the venue rather than re-derived, because their funding and fee conventions differ. And no aggregate is a substitute for reconciling against the venue before you act on it — a tracker is a lens, not a source of truth.
Yes, if every connection is read-only: broker links through an aggregator where you log in on the broker's own page, wallets by public address, exchange keys without withdrawal rights. None of those can move funds.
Usually double-counted exposure across wrappers, options counted at premium rather than committed collateral, collateral shown as free cash, or venues marking at different times.
Committed. Notional overstates leveraged and collateralised positions dramatically; committed capital is what actually constrains what you can do next.
At market value with the ×100 multiplier, with the collateral a short option reserves treated as committed rather than free cash.
No. It is a lens for seeing everything at once. Reconcile against the venue before acting — feeds can be delayed or wrong.
Stop losing the thread at the first roll. RiskGlass keeps brokerages, exchanges, wallets and venues in one book, with the analytics computed on top.
Open the live demo — no signupEducational only. Nothing here is investment, financial, legal or tax advice, and none of it is a recommendation to trade. Figures are worked examples, not forecasts. Verify against your broker before acting.