I'm figuring I'll eventually need audited statements of my trading history before I can raise money, etc. I'm in the middle of opening a new account with interactivebrokers.com and just asked them what the fee is for getting paper statements-- and they don't support that at all. They say I have to print it out myself. I'm not sure that will square with an auditor. Maybe if I log in right in front of him/her and let them print it out they will accept it as true-- I don't know. I'm honestly debating whether I need to switch to a different brokerage firm, though other than this issue IB meets my requirements for now. Anyone have experience with this? Thanks, -Taric
In case this helps anyone, I found some more information here.. IB will let you pay a fee (not sure how much) to do a special printout and direct mail of your account balance / trading history for auditing purposes. However, Tradestation has a procedure for direct trading history export to auditing firms, which for someone like a day trader probably saves a ton of money since some of the big auditors can use automated software instead of manually entering in every single trade. I think I'll stick with IB for the time being though.. -Taric
What leads you to think an auditor would ever need to type in a list of all trades? I don't think that is the case. An auditor (at least the Schindler Fund auditor) is interested in 1) beginning balance, 2) ending balance, and 3) and in-flows/out-flows. Whether the money you made in the month was due to 1 trade or 10,000, they'll all be lumped together as a single line on your income statement. Even for a Sch. D, it's unlikely that your tax accountant would type in all of your trades. And an auditor will test and verify your financial statements, not recreate your trading history.
Aaron, Ahh-- thanks for the info-- that helps a lot. I just assumed they would need all the trades for some reason like calculating maximum number of days in drawdown or that kind of thing (though I guess most of the hedge fund databases aren't nearly that detailed). Also I don't know if this is a separate issue or not but in general if the investors don't mind monthly results as opposed to daily that saves a lot of effort as well. But that puts me at ease a lot more, besides saving a lot of time, it also makes it easier to protect your strategy from reverse-engineering.. whew. By the way how I originally found ET was I was reading your interview on the site (sort of randomly from Google) and found it interesting-- great stuff! Pretty inspiring! -Taric