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Copy securities between portfolios

Sometimes, it is necessary to transfer securities between different portfolios, which involves copying information between physical XML files. However, the challenge lies in the fact that each security has historical pricing data associated with it, along with transactions tied to various cash accounts.

Drag & Drop

After opening two or more portfolios, they are displayed as tabs in the portfolio bar located just below the menu bar. The active portfolio, typically the last one opened, is easily discernible. It appears with a lighter color and an x-mark after the name, allowing you to close the tab. To switch between portfolios, simply select the corresponding tab in the portfolio bar. Only one portfolio can be viewed at a time.

However, for tasks like copying securities between portfolios, it's necessary to have both portfolios visible side by side. Securities cannot be directly dragged and dropped or copied and pasted between portfolios from the tabs in the portfolio bar.

Figure 1. Side-by-side display of two portfolios.

To arrange portfolios side by side, choose one in the portfolio bar, click and hold the mouse to drag it to a new position. With two portfolios, you can position them either horizontally (left to right) or vertically (top to bottom). In Figure 1, the arrangement is left to right. This process can be repeated with multiple portfolios, allowing you to make more than two portfolios visible at the same time. To restore the original arrangement, drag the portfolio into the portfolio bar.

For copying securities between portfolios, both portfolios need to be visible. Then, you can select a security from Portfolio A and drag it to the All Securities option in the side panel of portfolio B. There, you can drop the security to create a copy. Pay attention, as it's feasible to unintentionally create identical securities (e.g. two instances of share-1). You can also drop the security to a Watchlist. It will be added to this list then automatically.

Important

When you copy securities from one portfolio to another with drag-and-drop, the associated transactions will NOT be copied along with them. Only the security master data, including historical price information, will be transferred to the new portfolio. This means that any trades, dividends, or other transactions that were recorded for the security in the original portfolio will not be reflected in the new one. In the relatively rare case you need also the transactions, you can either enter them manually or use the following method.

Exporting & importing

With the menu File > Export > CSV Files, you can create a list of all securities, historical prices, and transactions. See File > Export for more info. Copying the securities with their historical prices however is much easier with the drag & drop technique, described above.

For example, after dragging share-3 from Figure 1 above to the demo-portfolio-03.xml, you can export the transactions of demo-portfolio-04.xml and import them in demo-portfolio-03.xml. You can either use the import type Accounts transactions or Portfolio transactions. The result of the export however contains ALL transactions of the project, not only those that are linked with share-3.

Date Type Value Transaction Currency Gross Amount Currency Gross Amount Exchange Rate Fees Taxes Shares ISIN WKN Ticker Symbol Security Name Note
2021-01-15T00:00 Buy 155 EUR 3 2 10 DTE.DE share-1 2
2023-04-12T00:00 Sell -105 EUR 5 2 5 DTE.DE share-1 8
2022-01-14T00:00 Buy 84 EUR 3 1 5 DTE.DE share-1 4
2022-09-30T00:00 Buy 67 EUR 2 1 8 TMV.DE share-2 6
2023-09-12T00:00 Buy 2,267.76 USD 14 6 4 ADBE share-3 10-copy

From this table, in fact, you need only the last row. Please note, that the purchase of share-3 is in USD. Because the main cash account is set to EUR, this will generate an error, unless you change (via the context menu) the cash account to USD for that particular transaction.

As can be seen in Figure 2, all transactions will be imported (green checkmark to the left). You can exclude the first four with the context menu Do not import (see Figure 2). Alternatively, you can delete the unwanted transactions from the original CSV file before importing it.

Figure 2. Importing transactions with change of cash account and exclusion.

A more efficient way to select desired transactions is to begin from the All Transactions view. While this list may be extensive, you can streamline it using the Search function. For instance, entering share-3 will filter the transactions to only display those associated with the security named share-3. Alternatively, you can utilize the Filter function available under View > Accounts > All Transactions. You can further narrow down the list by selecting individual transactions (see following topic).

Once you've refined the list, you can export it as either a CSV or JSON file. Click on the Export Data button (located at the top-right with an up-pointing icon) to export either all the displayed transactions or only the selected ones.

Copy and Paste

At times, it may be simpler to manually copy and paste the desired transactions, albeit still requiring a CSV file format to import the data.

  1. Select the desired security in the main pane. Navigate to the transactions tab in the information pane (refer to Figure 1). Only the transactions associated with the selected security will appear in the information pane. Selecting more than one security in the main pane does not display all transactions but only the transactions associated with the "active" security.
  2. To select all transactions, move the cursor above the top row, click, press and hold SHIFT (Windows), and then click on the last row. This action will select all rows between the first and last.
  3. For a non-contiguous selection, click the first row, press and hold CTRL (Windows), and click on the following rows accordingly.
  4. Once all desired rows are selected, press CTRL+C (Windows) to copy the content to the clipboard.
  5. Navigate to a spreadsheet or text editor and paste the content. PP uses the TAB-code as a list separator.
  6. Unfortunately, the header isn't copied along with the data. Therefore, you should either map the fields during the importing process (you can use a template for that) or manually add them to the pasted content.
  7. You still have to save the file with extension CSV and import it.

This technique will also work in the All Transactions view (see previous topic).

Copy between XML

Theoretically, one could also copy the transaction code between the two XML files. However, the XML code is optimized for speed which has a negative impact on the readability. A Buy transaction, for example, is represented by the following code snippet: 

<account-transaction>
    <uuid>0e6a94e5-da57-44d4-aeb1-37dc792d40ef</uuid>
    <date>2024-03-14T00:00</date>
    <currencyCode>EUR</currencyCode>
    <amount>19800</amount>
    <security reference="../../../../../securities/security[2]"/>
    <crossEntry class="buysell">
        <portfolio>
            <uuid>c1c03e7d-c320-4167-8737-2f35cfb1a2e0</uuid>
            <name>broker-1</name>
            <isRetired>false</isRetired>
            <referenceAccount reference="../../../../.."/>
            <transactions>
                <portfolio-transaction>
                    <uuid>75c79e11-4c3d-4b39-bf91-08ab04fe0088</uuid>
                    <date>2024-03-14T00:00</date>
                    <currencyCode>EUR</currencyCode>
                    <amount>19800</amount>
                    <security reference="../../../../../../../../../securities/security[2]"/>
                    <crossEntry class="buysell" reference="../../../.."/>
                    <shares>9900000000</shares>
                    <updatedAt>2024-03-14T10:06:25.707240300Z</updatedAt>
                    <type>BUY</type>
                </portfolio-transaction>
            </transactions>
            <attributes>
                <map/>
            </attributes>
            <updatedAt>2024-03-13T18:11:15.593620500Z</updatedAt>
        </portfolio>
        <portfolioTransaction reference="../portfolio/transactions/portfolio-transaction"/>
        <account reference="../../../.."/>
        <accountTransaction reference="../.."/>
    </crossEntry>
    <shares>0</shares>
    <updatedAt>2024-03-14T10:06:25.707240300Z</updatedAt>
    <type>BUY</type>
</account-transaction>
In practice, the XML code for a moderate project with a few transactions and historical prices often becomes excessively large and complex to navigate confidently. Additionally, relative references such as <security reference="../../../../../../../../../securities/security[2]"/> -which are the result of the optimization- assume an identical structure between the source and target XML, concerning list of securities. Moreover, this method is -of course- not applicable to binary-coded portfolios.