How to track a portfolio in multiple currencies

Quick question: if I woke you at three in the morning and demanded to know your net worth, could you give me one honest number? If your money lives in a single currency, sure. But the moment you own a US-listed ETF, a UK pension, a couple of euro-denominated holdings and a wallet of crypto, the honest answer is usually a shrug. You can track a portfolio in multiple currencies in your head about as well as you can do long division in a moving car. So most people don’t. They eyeball four or five separate balances, squint, and call it a feeling. That feeling is not a net worth. Let’s fix it.

Why a multi-currency portfolio never adds up

Here is the daft little trap. Each of your accounts is perfectly happy on its own. The broker shows your ETF in dollars. The pension shows up in pounds. The exchange shows euros, and the crypto shows whatever it feels like that hour. Every one of those screens is correct. None of them can talk to each other.

So you do the thing everyone does. You add up the pound numbers, add up the dollar numbers, and then stall, because pounds and dollars don’t sum. To get one figure you have to convert everything into a single yardstick, and that conversion is the fiddly bit nobody enjoys. The maths here is trivial. What kills the total is that no one owns the conversion job, so no one does it, and the one number you actually care about quietly goes missing.

Pick a base currency and mean it

The fix starts with one boringly powerful move. Choose a base currency and commit to it. This is the yardstick everything else gets measured against. If you live and spend in pounds, your base currency is pounds, full stop. The dollar ETF and the euro holdings don’t stop being a dollar ETF and euro holdings. They just get translated into pounds whenever you want to know where you stand overall.

People overthink this. Your base currency is simply the money you eat, sleep and pay rent in. Everything you own is then worth “this many of those,” today, and that is the figure you can actually reason about. Pick it once. Don’t agonise.

Converting consistently is the whole game

Now for the part that separates a real number from a vibe. Once you have a base currency, every other holding gets converted into it using the same rate, at the same moment, every single time you look. The whole trick lives in that word, consistently. Skip it and the rest collapses.

This is precisely where the hand-built version falls apart, and it’s worth being honest about because plenty of clever people have tried it. You open a spreadsheet, you type in today’s exchange rates, you build a column that multiplies everything through, and for one shining afternoon it works. Then tomorrow happens. Rates move. You update one currency and forget the other. You paste a number from a website into the wrong cell. Three weeks later you’re staring at a total and you genuinely cannot tell whether your portfolio moved or your stale rates did. A book you can’t reconcile is a book you can’t trust, and a book of hand-typed FX rates starts rotting the moment you close the laptop.

Think about how that rot actually happens. The rates go stale the instant you stop updating them, and you always stop. You refresh one currency and forget another, so the total quietly lies to you. A fat-fingered paste turns a rounding slip into a phantom gain. The nasty part is that none of it announces itself. The number on the screen still looks exactly like a number.

The point is one honest net-worth figure

Strip away the mechanics and here is what all this effort actually buys you: a single net-worth figure you can state without a wince. One number that already has the dollar ETF, the pound pension, the euro holdings and the crypto folded into the same currency. Now you can compare them, rank them, see at a glance whether the whole book is up or down instead of squinting at five accounts in five denominations.

That is the gap between knowing your net worth and guessing at it. Translate every holding into your base currency from one source at one moment, and the total stops being a feeling and turns into a fact. When it moves, it moves because your holdings did, not because your rates went off. That is the whole promise of tracking a portfolio in multiple currencies properly. Not more dashboards. One trustworthy line.

How Strata does the converting for you

So here’s the version where you don’t babysit a spreadsheet for the rest of your life. You enter what you own, in whatever currency it trades in. A US ETF in dollars, a pension in pounds, euro holdings in euros, crypto in crypto. You type it once, the way you’d type it on a statement, and that’s the end of your job.

From that pile of facts, Strata values each holding from public market data and converts every one into your chosen base currency using rates it fetches, so the same yardstick lands on everything at the same moment. You never paste an FX rate. You never reconcile two stale columns at midnight. Conversion becomes the computer’s problem, which is exactly where it belongs. Back comes one reconciled net-worth view across asset classes, accounts and currencies, with realised and unrealised P&L that already speak your base currency.

One honest caveat. The numbers above show how the view behaves, not a forecast of any rate on any given day. Markets and currencies move; what Strata hands you is a consistent way to read them. Manual entry, read-only, on purpose. No brokerage credentials change hands. Nothing logs in as you. The ledger stays yours.

If you keep more than one account, this is one half of a bigger consolidation story. The same idea that lets you collapse many currencies into one number is what lets you track a portfolio across multiple brokerage accounts in a single book, and if the manual-entry part gives you pause, here’s why Strata is manual by design rather than by accident.

So, where do you stand?

Here is the test. Open your accounts right now and try to state your net worth in one currency, with a straight face. If you can, wonderful, you don’t need any of this. If you caught yourself reaching for a calculator, or for a guesstimate, then your money is spread across several yardsticks and you’ve never once measured it with a single one.

You can keep doing the squint-and-shrug. Plenty of people will, for years. Or you can type your holdings in once, let the converting happen on its own, and finally have a net-worth number you’d be willing to defend at three in the morning. If that sounds like the standard your money deserves, you can build your portfolio and see every currency you own as one honest figure.