Yes, Robinhood has a built-in portfolio tracker: the free brokerage account shows a portfolio chart with overall return in dollars and percent, plus basic and advanced charts per holding. What it doesn’t show: benchmark comparisons, money-weighted returns (your return counting deposits), other brokers’ accounts — and crypto, futures and spending live in separate silos.
Robinhood made buying effortless — and seeing an afterthought. The app will happily show you a green number; whether that number means what you think it means is another story. Here’s what the free app genuinely shows, where it structurally stops, and what your real options are for tracking a Robinhood portfolio. Avex provides mathematical context, not investment advice.
Key Takeaways
- Robinhood’s free account has a real portfolio tracker — charts per holding and a portfolio-level return figure — but no benchmark comparison and no cross-broker view.
- Cost basis can be challenging to track, especially after transferring securities in from other brokers or when wash sales occur.
- Dedicated trackers and spreadsheets can show the fuller picture — including other brokers — at the cost of either money or time.
- Robinhood is FINRA-regulated and SIPC-protected up to $500,000 — though crypto, futures and swaps sit outside that protection.
Does Robinhood have a built-in portfolio tracker?
Yes — but with structural gaps worth understanding before you trust it. A standard free brokerage account shows a portfolio chart on the Investing page: overall portfolio return in USD and percent for a given day, based on your Robinhood holdings. The daily-return baseline differs if you hold crypto: for securities, Robinhood uses the previous market close (4 pm ET) as the baseline; for crypto — tradable 24 hours — it uses the current day’s prices from 12 am in your time zone. Robinhood states that deposits, withdrawals and transfers are not counted in the portfolio return, which reflects investment performance rather than asset movements.
Per holding, you can open a basic chart (line or candlestick) for stocks, ETFs and crypto — the line chart tracks the closing price over time, while candlesticks add open/close/high/low detail per interval — or an advanced chart with customized intervals and technical indicators. Futures get basic charts only. Time spans run from one hour to five years for crypto, and from one day to MAX for stocks and ETFs.
Where the free tier stops: richer analysis — including benchmark comparison — belongs to Robinhood Strategies, a paid subscription. The free brokerage account offers no benchmark comparison and does not compute money-weighted rates of return (the return that accounts for your deposits and withdrawals). There is no cross-broker view, and crypto, futures and spending each live in their own silo.
Where do I see my actual returns?
The portfolio chart on the Investing page is the closest thing — read it knowing what it leaves out. According to Robinhood, the chart reflects investment performance and does not account for deposits, withdrawals or transfers — closer in spirit to a time-weighted view than to the money-weighted return that shows what your dollars actually earned. Robinhood itself cautions that its charts “may not accurately take into account the impacts of … events relating to [an investor’s] account or portfolio such as charges, deposits, or withdrawals, and may in certain circumstances overstate or understate gains or losses.”
The following example illustrates how deposits can inflate the feeling of return — the distinction simple app graphs generally don’t make for you.
January: account worth $10,000. During the year you deposit $500/month ($6,000 total). December: account worth $17,500. The feel-good math: “up $7,500 — that’s 75%!” The honest math: $6,000 of that was your own money; the investments earned $1,500 on an average balance of ~$13,000 — a return closer to 11–12%. Same account, same year. The difference is whether deposits are counted as growth.
The cost basis problem
Transfers in are where “the app says X, my records say Y” begins. Robinhood supports full and partial account transfers in via ACATS (with a reimbursement of up to $75 for transfers of $7,500 or more, per account type and brokerage). The outside brokerage has up to 15 calendar days after settlement to send your cost basis over — and for securities classed as noncovered, the IRS does not require adjusted basis or original acquisition dates to be transmitted at all. That’s how positions arrive with murky or missing basis.
Wash sales add the second layer: the IRS disallows claiming losses from wash sales and requires the disallowed loss to be added to the cost of the newly acquired securities — an adjustment that complicates basis tracking further, and often lands only at year-end on the 1099.
Your options for tracking a Robinhood portfolio
Three realistic paths: the app as-is, a spreadsheet, or a dedicated tracker — the trade-offs below are the short version, and our guide to tracking an investment portfolio covers the full system around them. The app is free, fast and fine for glancing at your Robinhood-only picture; it stops fitting when you want other brokers in the same view or more honest return data. Spreadsheets are free but cost time — right for investors who want a fully customized tracker and have the patience to build one. Dedicated trackers consolidate multiple brokers in one view, at a price. For investors concerned about privacy, tracking a portfolio without linking accounts is a viable option too. (Our Fidelity portfolio tracker guide, coming next in this series, looks at how a full-service broker handles the same questions.)
| Capability | Robinhood app | Spreadsheet | Dedicated tracker |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live prices & headline P&L | ✓ | Manual/delayed | ✓ |
| Returns vs deposits (money-weighted) | ✕ | ✓ if built correctly | ✓ |
| Reliable lot-level cost basis | Partial (transfers/wash sales) | ✓ your records | ✓ from your files |
| Crypto & futures in one view | ✕ (separate silos) | ✓ manually | Depends on tool |
| Other brokers in the same view | ✕ | ✓ with effort | ✓ |
| Cost | Free | Free + your time | Varies / early access |
Getting your data out
Robinhood’s export is a report you commission, not a button you click. You can generate a customized account activity report covering all transactions across your brokerage and retirement accounts, downloadable as CSV — it takes anywhere from 2 to 24 hours to build, and it excludes crypto, futures and spending activity. Our Robinhood CSV export guide has the exact clicks, the waits and the gaps.
Your records vs your 1099
The consolidated 1099 covers filing; your records cover proving. Robinhood issues one PDF per tax year under Robinhood Markets, Inc., bundling the 1099s for Robinhood Money, Derivatives, Crypto and Securities. What it can’t do: track transferred basis and cross-broker wash sales — those stay the investor’s responsibility, and your exports are the evidence trail. If you use more than one platform, our US broker export cheat-sheet covers the export path and trap for 8 US platforms on one page.
Is Robinhood safe?
Yes — on the regulatory facts. Robinhood is FINRA-regulated, and its brokerage and clearing services are SIPC-protected: up to $500,000 for cash and securities per brokerage account, of which up to $250,000 covers cash to buy securities. Crypto, futures and swaps are not SIPC-covered.
Portfolio tracker · you are here — what the app shows and hides
CSV export guide → get your data out: the generate-and-wait flow, and what’s missing from the file
When investors transfer assets from other brokerage or custodial accounts to their Robinhood account, it can take up to 15 calendar days for Robinhood to receive the cost basis information from the outside brokerages. If the transfer contains noncovered securities, the cost basis might be missing, since the IRS specifies that this information is not required when transferring noncovered securities. Additionally, investors cannot deduct losses from trades in a wash sale — the disallowed loss is added to the cost of the newly acquired security. These implications might not be reflected in the Robinhood cost basis.
The Robinhood app does not allow investors to track their Robinhood accounts together with their other brokerage accounts. Spreadsheets and dedicated trackers enable investors to track investments from different brokers in one place.
By creating a customized account activity report and downloading it as a CSV. The report includes transactions across your investment and brokerage accounts, but does not include crypto, futures, and spending account activity.
No, crypto is not SIPC-protected. Securities and cash are SIPC-protected up to $500,000 in an investor’s brokerage account, including up to $250,000 for cash to buy securities — but this does not apply to crypto, futures, or swaps.
Robinhood shows an overall portfolio return on the portfolio chart, but deposits, withdrawals and transfers are not included in the calculation — which means the figure may overstate or understate your experience in certain circumstances, particularly if you deposit regularly.
Sources & references
- Robinhood Support — Using charts
- Robinhood Support — Robinhood Strategies charts
- Robinhood Support — Finding your reports and statements
- Robinhood Support — Transfers (ACATS) & tax articles
- IRS — Instructions for Form 1099-B
- IRS — Publication 550: Investment Income and Expenses (wash sales)
- SIPC — What SIPC protects
