What Is a Trading Portfolio? Accounts as One Curve

A trading portfolio is a set of connected accounts merged into a single equity curve, with every statistic recomputed on that curve as though it had always been one account. It is not a summary screen sitting on top of several accounts; it is one account rebuilt from all of their trades.

How it works

The distinction that matters is between combining the results and combining the data.

Wrong:  portfolio return = (R₁ + R₂ + R₃) / 3

Right:  merge every closed trade and every daily equity point
        into one curve, then compute TWR, drawdown and the
        ratios on that curve

The merge happens server-side, and its rules explain most of the surprises. Trades from every selected account are pooled and sorted by close time. Daily balance and equity are summed date by date, and an account that reported nothing that day contributes its last known value, not a zero. Gain is a time-weighted return recomputed on the merged curve, never an average of members. Drawdown is recomputed there too, as equity against the running peak of merged balance. Broker, currency and account name resolve to the shared value when every member agrees, and to Mixed when they do not.

Between 1 and 50 accounts go into a portfolio, and a user can hold up to 30; MT4, MT5, cTrader and TradeLocker can mix freely. Currencies are not converted: balance, equity and profit are summed as the brokers report them, so a EUR account beside a USD one gives a total that is not money in any currency. Cent accounts are worse — USC is normalised to USD for the label, so the portfolio will not even mark itself Mixed while reporting totals a hundred times too large.

Why it matters

Because the three intuitive ways to combine accounts are all wrong. Summing balances rewards you for moving your own money around. Averaging percentages lets +40% on a $500 account cancel −5% on a $50,000 one, when the money says roughly −4.6%. Quoting the best account is survivorship bias applied to yourself.

The merged curve also answers what the individual pages cannot: whether the second account diversified anything. A combined drawdown in percent cannot be worse than your deepest single account — a blend cannot fall further than its worst component. Where it lands under that ceiling is decided by correlation and little else. Correlated accounts land beside the worst one, and in cash the loss is the sum of all of them.

What the data shows

Running several accounts is the normal case on ShowMyTrades: 699 users have more than one account and 429 of those hold accounts at more than one broker. Yet only 182 portfolios exist platform-wide (August 2026) — a fraction of the people the feature was built for.

Correlation is the default, because the accounts are usually automated: across the published accounts with history the median autotrading share is 99% and 53.9% are more than 90% automated. The same EA on three accounts is one strategy with three sets of costs. For scale, median deepest drawdown is 9.7% and 38.2% of accounts have been more than 20% underwater.

Where you see it on ShowMyTrades

Portfolios live under Dashboard → Portfolios, built by naming one and ticking accounts from a checkbox list. The page reuses the account layout — stats panel, charts viewer, Monthly Returns, Advanced Statistics, currency pair breakdown, trades table — every figure computed on the merged data. Publishing one produces a public page on the same /account/ path, under a slug generated from the name and prefixed ptf- — fixed once created, where an account slug can be edited. Visibility offers the same three states as an account: private, published or unlisted.

One control exists only here: Custom Analysis gains an Accounts section, one chip per member labelled with the short account ID. Deselect one and every statistic recomputes without it, answering "what does this look like without the martingale account" in a click.

Two things do not carry over. A verified track record is not shown: it belongs to a single account and its investor password, and the portfolio record does not store the field at all. Terminal Info is requested but the backend has no aggregate to return, so the section stays empty — ping, build and autotrading state stay on the individual account pages.

Common misunderstandings

• "My portfolio gain should match the average of my accounts." It should not. It is one time-weighted return on one curve, so a large account dominates and a small account with a spectacular percentage barely registers.
• "Adding accounts reduces drawdown." Only if their troughs fall on different dates. Compare dates on each account's drawdown chart, not depths.
• "Shifting money between my own accounts distorts it." Gain will not move: time-weighted return treats a transfer as a balance change, not a return. If both accounts sit in the same portfolio, one side's withdrawal offsets the other's deposit in the merged balance too.
• "A dead account in the portfolio is harmless." Its last equity is carried forward as a flat line, which dilutes the return and softens the drawdown percentage. Reconnect it or remove it.

The build flow, the correlation test and the five ways people flatter themselves are in the multi-account portfolio guide.

Related terms