Broker API Comparison: Holdings

Holdings look like the simplest thing an API could report — a list of shares and how many you own. In practice this is the least consistent area of the whole comparison, and the gaps are bigger than most people expect.

Three questions decide whether a holdings response is actually usable:

1. Does it tell you what your holding is worth? Several APIs send no profit and loss and no current price at all.
2. What happens when you sell part of it during the day? This is the question that causes real errors.
3. Does it account for pledged stock, and the margin that pledge gives you?

✅ provided · ⚠️ provided with a limitation · ❌ not provided · — not stated in the documentation

What each broker API sends on a holding

Broker	Profit & loss	Day change	Sold qty reported	Pledged qty	Margin from pledge	T1 unsettled
Upstox	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Zerodha	✅	✅	✅	✅	⚠️	✅
Fyers	✅	❌	✅	✅	⚠️	✅
Angel One	✅	❌	—	✅	⚠️	⚠️
AliceBlue	⚠️	⚠️	⚠️	✅	✅	✅
Shared platform — Symphony XTS	❌	❌	✅	✅	⚠️	✅
Shared platform — Kambala	❌	❌	✅	✅	⚠️	✅
Nuvama	❌	❌	✅	✅	⚠️	✅
SAS Online (Stocko)	⚠️	⚠️	✅	✅	⚠️	✅
Motilal	❌	❌	✅	✅	⚠️	❌
Mastertrust	✅	❌	✅	❌	⚠️	✅
Kotak	❌	❌	⚠️	❌	⚠️	❌
Dhan	❌	❌	⚠️	✅	⚠️	✅
Groww	❌	❌	⚠️	✅	⚠️	✅
5paisa	❌	❌	—	❌	⚠️	✅
Sharekhan	❌	❌	⚠️	✅	⚠️	❌
Choice	❌	❌	❌	❌	⚠️	❌

The sold-quantity question

This is the one to get right. When you sell part of a holding during the day, broker APIs behave in three different ways.

Most brokers keep the quantity and report the sale separately

The holding quantity stays as it was at the start of the day, and a separate field tells you how much of it you have sold. You subtract one from the other yourself.

Zerodha, Upstox, Fyers, Motilal, Nuvama, SAS Online, Mastertrust, Symphony XTS and Kambala all work this way. Two are especially clear about it:

• Fyers keeps the opening quantity and gives a second field for what remains after the day’s sales — so both numbers survive and neither has to be inferred.
• Symphony XTS names its field plainly as the quantity sold from the net holding.

The Kambala platform goes furthest and publishes two different formulas: one for valuing a holding and one for working out what you may sell. They are not the same formula, and using one where the other belongs gives a wrong answer.

One trap on Upstox: its field counts quantity blocked by open sell orders as well as completed ones. So it answers “what is unavailable” rather than “what did I sell” — the right number for deciding whether you may sell, but not for working out what you actually sold.

A few brokers give you the answer directly

Kotak, AliceBlue and Sharekhan skip the arithmetic and report an available or sellable quantity outright. That is simpler, but you lose the detail — you cannot see why the sellable figure differs from the total. On AliceBlue in particular, the total quantity field does not behave as a simple sum of the other quantities, so it should not be read as “everything I hold”.

A few document nothing

Angel One, Groww, Dhan and 5paisa publish quantity fields whose behaviour on an intraday sale is not stated. Something reasonable may well happen — but it is not documented, so it cannot be relied on without checking a live account.

Choice reports a single quantity with no sellable, used or blocked figure alongside it, so there is nothing to reconcile — but equally no way to tell settled stock from stock you have already sold today.

Why this matters. Get it wrong in one direction and you double-count shares you have already sold, and try to sell stock you no longer have. Get it wrong in the other and you block yourself from selling stock you do hold. AutoTrader Web handles this per broker so you see one correct number.

Profit and loss on holdings

Five APIs give a real profit and loss figure on each holding: Zerodha, Angel One, Upstox, Fyers and Mastertrust. Of those, only Zerodha and Upstox also give a separate day change, so you can tell today’s movement from the gain since you bought.

Several give nothing at all. Dhan, Groww, 5paisa, Motilal, Nuvama, Kotak, Sharekhan, Choice and both large shared platforms send no profit and loss on holdings. Worse, several of them send no current price either — only an average cost. That means the holdings response on its own cannot tell you what your shares are worth today.

A few sit in between, marked ⚠️ above. AliceBlue and SAS Online send a current price and previous close alongside your average cost, so both the day change and the overall gain can be worked out, they are just not given as ready figures.

Pledged stock and collateral margin

Most APIs report the pledged quantity. Only Kotak, 5paisa, Mastertrust and Choice do not.

Far fewer report the margin that pledge actually gives you. This is the number that matters, because it is what you can trade with.

• Upstox and AliceBlue give it as a clear named figure.
• Everyone else reports collateral only as a single lump amount inside the funds response, not against the individual holding. So you can see your total collateral margin, but not which share contributed what.

Several APIs also send a haircut percentage — the discount applied to a share’s market value when it is used as collateral. Angel One, Upstox, Nuvama, Kambala and Symphony XTS all send it, which is enough to check the collateral figure yourself.

Unsettled stock

T1 is stock you have bought that has not yet settled into your demat account. Most APIs report it separately.

Two things to watch:

• Some brokers also include T1 inside the total quantity, so adding both double-counts it. Angel One and Groww both do this.
• SAS Online is unusual in reporting three separate settlement buckets rather than one, which is more detail than any other API here.

Kotak, Motilal, Sharekhan and Choice do not report unsettled stock at all. Motilal reports a related but different figure that should not be treated as the same thing.

One more thing worth knowing

5paisa’s holdings response is cached, and it tells you so by returning its own cache age. No other broker API in this comparison discloses this. It means a holdings figure read immediately after a trade may not reflect that trade yet.

Related help

• Margins comparison — where collateral margin actually appears
• Positions comparison — profit and loss on open positions
• All six areas — the comparison hub
• Portfolio screen