Where to start
These are not sequential, and most people arrive at one of them from a search rather than from here. But if you are starting cold, the useful order depends on what you are actually trying to settle:
- Deciding whether to trust a tracker with your holdings at all? Start with tracking without an account. It covers what the signup step is technically for and when a server-backed tracker is genuinely the better answer.
- Migrating an existing portfolio? The DeGiro import guide first — picking the wrong export costs you your entire cost basis, and it is not obvious which is which.
- Wondering whether the retirement date is real? The FIRE projection sets out the exact formula and, more usefully, the five things it does not model.
- Holding shares in more than one country? Withholding tax by country and multi-currency tracking are the two places international portfolios are most often quietly wrong.
Unfamiliar terminology in any of them is defined in the glossary.
What these have in common
Each guide documents a mechanism rather than asserting a benefit. Where the app approximates something — inferring dividend frequency from date spacing, deriving a withholding country from an exchange timezone, treating an annual return as a nominal rate — the guide says so and explains why that approximation was chosen over the alternatives.
Two of them are useful even if you never install the app: the withholding rate table is a plain reference, and the pence trap is worth ten seconds of checking in whatever tracker you already use.
All guides
Tracking a portfolio without an account
What a tracker account is technically for, what it costs you in privacy and lock-in, and the honest cases where a server-backed tracker is the better choice.
Importing a DeGiro CSV export
DeGiro's two exports and what each contains, the Dutch number-format trap that silently corrupts data, why the files carry no tickers, and safe re-importing.
How the FIRE projection works
The exact monthly-compounding formula, the two goal modes, why an entered 7% compounds to 7.23%, and the five things the model deliberately does not include.
How dividend forecasting works
Inferring payout frequency from ex-dividend date spacing, and why netting out withholding tax changes the picture for an international portfolio.
Withholding tax rates by country
A reference table of standard dividend withholding rates for 39 countries, what each does to a 4% gross yield, and what treaty relief changes.
Multi-currency portfolio tracking
Why cost basis needs dated exchange rates, how cross-rates stay consistent, and the London pence trap that overstates a holding by 100x.
What's new in Version 3
The running list of what Version 3 brought: the FIRE projection, the rebuilt dividend view, the Dutch index lists and a Stocks page that opens with your totals.
Portfolio On Fire on Android
Where the Android build stands, what closed testing means, and how to join the tester group.
Glossary
Every dividend, FIRE and currency term used across these guides, defined plainly and cross-linked.
A tracker that shows you a retirement date and a dividend forecast is asking you to trust arithmetic you cannot see. These pages set out the arithmetic — the actual formula, the actual rate table, the actual parsing rules — including where it approximates and where it deliberately does not model something. The reasoning behind that is here.