Link Your Brokerage with Plaid

Pro accounts can link a brokerage through Plaid, the connection service used across the finance industry. Once linked, your holdings, transactions, and dividends flow in automatically. No manual upkeep.

How Linking Works

1. On the Portfolio page, choose to link a brokerage (from the Settings tab or the add-account flow).
2. A Plaid window opens. Pick your brokerage and sign in inside Plaid's window.
3. Choose which accounts to share. Each one appears in your portfolio and starts syncing.

Most brokerages send everything within a minute. Some (Fidelity, at times) take up to two days to send a new connection's first positions and history. Until they arrive, the portfolio page says it's waiting for them. They appear on their own, so there's no need to relink: each relink starts the wait over.

If a newly linked account looks like a manual account you were already tracking, we offer a guided merge: your dividend history and Initial Dollars Invested carry over, and the manual copy is retired so totals aren't double-counted.

What Syncs

• Holdings and cash: positions and balances, with live prices layered on during the day.
• Transactions: buys, sells, and transfers, with up to two years of history backfilled when you link. That history also reconstructs your value chart back in time.
• Dividends: payments are detected and attributed into your income log automatically, including whether they were reinvested.

Missing Older Dividends?

Brokerages decide how much history they share. Most send one to two years; a few send less. Dividend History names the date each linked account's dividends start from. To fill in what came before, use Add Dividend or Import History right there (or Add & Import at the top of the page) and choose the linked account. The payments stay with that account through every sync, and if your brokerage later sends one of them itself, its copy replaces yours so nothing counts twice. Relinking won't bring more history, and disconnecting a brokerage deletes the payments you added to its accounts, so choose Convert to Manual if you want to keep them.

Syncs run automatically, but the timing is set by your brokerage: brokerages release new trades and dividend payments overnight, so today's activity usually appears the next morning. We re-check at least every six hours and as soon as new data is reported. The Re-check action on a connection in Settings pulls the latest data available right away, but it can't fetch a trade your brokerage hasn't released yet. If you bought something this evening, expect it tomorrow morning.

Positions often update before the trade itself: many brokerages show the new share count the same day but send the trade details only after it settles, a day or two later. When a linked position changes and no matching trade has arrived, Activity lists it right away as a Pending buy, sell, or reinvestment. The share count is your brokerage's own; the price and amount are estimates from the latest price, marked ≈. When the brokerage sends the trade, its record replaces the pending row. A change that turns out to be a stock split, or a position your brokerage re-listed under a new identifier, never shows as a trade, and a pending row the brokerage never confirms drops off after 10 days.

Adding More Accounts from a Brokerage You Already Linked

Don't link the same brokerage login twice. Some brokerages (Charles Schwab, notably) only keep their newest connection updated, so signing in again from scratch creates a duplicate connection and quietly freezes the original one. Instead, use your existing connection: when you start linking with a connection already in place, we ask first and offer Add Accounts, which reopens Plaid on that connection so you can change which accounts it shares.

When your brokerage reports a new account (a new IRA, say), the portfolio page tells you and offers Add Account, which opens the same picker. If you'd rather not add it, dismiss the notice.

If a Connection Stops Receiving Data

If a brokerage stops sharing data with one of your connections (usually because the same login was linked again; see above), we flag it: the connection shows Stopped receiving data in Settings, and a notice on the portfolio page tells you when the data froze. Your holdings stay visible at their last synced values. Choose Reconnect on the connection you want to keep (you'll re-approve it at your brokerage and can re-share all of your accounts), and disconnect any duplicates you didn't mean to keep.

Rarely, our own updates of a connection keep failing. After a day the connection shows Not updating in Settings, and a notice on the portfolio page says when it last updated. Your holdings stay visible at their last synced values. We're alerted automatically and keep retrying, and once an update goes through, everything you missed (trades, dividends, new positions) comes in on its own.

Where Your Credentials Go

Honest and simple: your brokerage username and password are entered with Plaid, never with Dividend Data. We never see, transmit, or store them. What we receive from Plaid is read-only account data: positions, balances, transactions. Nobody can trade or move money through this connection.

Disconnecting or Converting to Manual

From the Settings tab you can convert a linked account to manual (it keeps its holdings and history and becomes editable by hand, useful if you leave that brokerage or Pro) or disconnect it entirely, which removes the connection and deletes its synced accounts, holdings and dividend history (your combined value-history chart keeps the past). When in doubt, convert.

Disconnecting and linking again is not a repair. A new link only brings back the history your brokerage still shares, which is often less than what was saved here. To fix a sign-in problem or change which accounts are shared, use Reconnect (the Disconnect confirmation offers Reconnect Instead): it keeps everything.

If you later relink the same accounts, the new link rebuilds the same value history the kept chart already shows, so you'd see the period counted twice. When that happens, a prompt offers to remove the old copies with one click; removing them only cleans up the chart history, never holdings or dividends. History of an account you genuinely left (with no overlapping replacement) is left alone.

You can also delete a single linked account directly, just like a manual one, from Manage Accounts or Settings. It won't be re-imported by the connection's automatic sync, and if it was the last account on that connection, the connection is disconnected for you too.

Coming from the Old Terminal

Brokerage links from the previous version of Dividend Data ran on a different connection service and can't carry over. You'll see a one-time notice: re-link through Plaid once, and the guided merge reunites the new connection with your migrated history. Details in Coming from the Old Terminal.