A portfolio tracker for South African investors

The rand is why the usual numbers mislead

A portfolio held offshore and measured in rand can rise handsomely in a year when the underlying funds did nothing at all. The reverse happens too, and it is worse: a good year for the market can look flat because the rand strengthened. Neither movement has anything to do with how much you invested or how the companies performed, and a single "total return" percentage folds all three together.

BorderFolio keeps them apart by construction. A portfolio has one base currency — rand or dollar, your choice — and every transaction is converted at the rate on the day it happened, never at today's rate. A R10,000 contribution made in 2023 stays a R10,000 contribution forever; the currency move since then shows up as market movement, where it belongs, instead of quietly inflating your record of what you put in. The method, and its limits.

Withholding, and the paperwork it depends on

South Africa has an income tax treaty with the United States, so a South African resident holding US-domiciled funds or US stocks is subject to 15% US withholding on portfolio dividends under the treaty table rather than the statutory 30% — provided a valid W-8BEN is on file with the broker. Where documentation is missing or has expired, the 30% applies regardless of what the treaty says, and the difference shows up quietly on the dividend line of a statement nobody reads closely.

That is only step one. Step two is South African tax on foreign dividends, which has its own partial exemption for individuals and its own rules on crediting the foreign tax already suffered — and it is not a number this page will state for you, because it depends on your full position. What the product does is model both steps from the residence and rates you configure, per instrument, against dividends your portfolio actually paid. The South African withholding page covers step one in full.

On the estate side, South Africa is one of the countries with a US estate tax treaty, which is a materially better position than a no-treaty residence — though US-situs holdings are still worth knowing about rather than discovering later.

Feeder funds hide a layer

A JSE-listed feeder fund or offshore-exposure ETF is convenient: rand in, global exposure out, no offshore account and no allowance paperwork. It also puts another wrapper between you and the dividend. By the time a distribution reaches your account it may have been withheld on twice — once where the underlying companies are, once where the intermediate fund is domiciled — and the statement shows you only the net figure at the end of the chain.

Holding the same exposure through a direct offshore account changes the chain and the paperwork, not the underlying companies. Neither route is automatically right; what is unhelpful is not being able to see which layers your money is passing through. Tracking each holding by its actual fund domicile is how that becomes visible. What domicile changes.

Allowances, records and the February year end

Moving money offshore runs through the exchange control allowances: the single discretionary allowance, raised to R2 million per calendar year in the 2026 Budget and usable without prior tax clearance, and the foreign investment allowance of up to R10 million per calendar year, which requires SARS approval. Limits change; confirm the current figures before relying on them.

What that means for record-keeping is more mundane and more annoying: contributions arrive in rand, land in dollars, and have to be reconstructed a year later against a tax year that ends in February rather than December. A tracker that stores each purchase with its own date and its own rate is doing the part of that job you would otherwise redo by hand every autumn.

Whatever your broker is

Upload the statement it already produces — a local platform's PDF, an EasyEquities or IBKR export, a CSV, or a screenshot of a mobile app. Positions, purchases, dividends and stated commissions are extracted and shown for review before anything is added. There is no broker connection and no credentials involved at any point, which also means no dependency on whether your platform offers an API. How import works.

A multi-month export is worth more than a current-holdings screenshot: it rebuilds the contribution history behind the position, so the split between your money and market growth is meaningful from the first import rather than after a year of use. Rand-denominated local holdings and offshore holdings can sit in one portfolio, or in separate portfolios with a combined view on Pro.

Limits, plainly

• Not tax advice, and not a SARS filing figure. Every number is an informational estimate on your own holdings, with its assumptions shown. See the disclaimer.
• Step one comes from the IRS treaty table, not from your account; what your broker actually withheld is on your statement and can differ.
• Step two is modelled from the rates you configure, not from South African legislation encoded in the product.
• Allowance figures change — the numbers above are as announced for 2026.
• Individual bonds and treasuries are not imported yet; funds holding them are.