Hello!
I’m using Capitally about a year now, so recently I manually enabled cash balances and set currency to PLN. Than it was perfectly fine, didn’t see any issue. Today I imported two transaction. One asset sold and another bought (I bought more something I already had, if that matters). After importing I got weird returns, that in some point I almost lost all my money. See attached screenshots.
I never done any shorts or similar transaction. Only things I have ever done, are normal stocks for keeping long and treasury bonds.
You are correct that a cash balance, unless it’s in foreign currencies, should not cause such high volatility in your rate of return. To find the source of the fluctuation:
Navigate to the Portfolio view.
Examine the Returns chart to identify which specific asset is causing the sharp movements.
To confirm the issue is tied to the recent imports, you can temporarily Undo them from the top-right menu. Observe the chart, and then Redo the imports to see the impact again.
2. Correct Your Cash Balance History
Accurate performance metrics depend on a complete and correct transaction history for your cash accounts. An incorrect starting balance or missing transactions can cause calculation errors.
Here is how to check and fix your cash balance:
Select the relevant cash account and open one of its cash assets.
Go to the Transactions tab.
Sort the transactions by date in ascending order.
Review the Balance column. Look for any weird balances, like big negative ones, to pinpoint the problematic transaction. You will also see it on the chart.
You have two options to fix this:
Option A (Comprehensive): Ensure all historical cash transactions (deposits, withdrawals, etc.) are imported.
Option B (Easier): If you don’t have all transactions, simply create an “Account Balance” transaction. Set it to a known, correct value on a specific date in the past. From that point forward, all subsequent transactions should be reconciled correctly.
Thank you for quick reply. I’ve tried it, but still cannot figure it out.
For bonds, I just see a negative PLN asset, which is about 80% of my invested money in bonds, but just negative.
For stocks, I see TSLA stock is making a huge return mistakes, but I don’t know why is that. I tried to look at transaction and can’t see any wrong things.
I also set up a new project, downloaded all transactions from all my account from the very beginning and still the reruns are wrong. What could I provide you to help it figure out?
So, the culprit here is, that you’ve enabled Cash Tracking, but have no cash transfers. This creates completely wrong cash balances, which causes rate of return metrics to be incorrect - because there are wrong cash flows and invested principals.
How to fix this:
Switch Cash Tracking option to: Enable on accounts with existing cash balance
Add actual cash transfers between the broker and your bank account. eMakler importer should import them for you. Obligacje unfortunately don’t, as PKO is not kind enough to include it in their files. But you can just get these transfers from your bank account’s history.
It looks like you have two broker accounts imported into one in Capitally. It’s best to keep them separate, so you can compare the balances. When importing from each account, you will need to select a proper account on the review screen, or you can create a copy of the importer, so it’s always set on a particular account.
I did once again download all the transactions and can history from eMakler. I created a new project and starting from scratch. Set cash tracking to: Enable on accounts with existing cash balance.
I discovered that the default eMakler import template are not detecting all cash transaction as I thought it would be. There’re no errors so that’s why I failed first time.
Yes, I have two, because last year when I had each account as separate, but when importing transaction for the same asset on two separate accounts it auto assigned all assets to an account that was imported last. E.g. bought and imported 10 shares of stock X on acc A, than bought and imported 5 shares of the same stock X on different acc B. It assigned me all 15 shares of stock X to acc B, even though in transaction history it was on separate accounts. Either I did something wrong or it was a bug, but haven’t tried it since.
I’ll make a custom template for eMakler to include all transactions and I’ll try it one more time tomorrow. If you want to see this csv files from eMakler let me know, I can send them to you as well.