I can't stand all the current tax programs that charge based on how many trades you make. $300+ a year is a joke. I used Simply Track for the last 2 years http://www.vbssol.com/index.html Cost is $50. You can download and test out the software, the only limitation is that you cannot print or save to pdf at the end. It helps me combine trades and adjust for stock split. However, since IB now generates it's own Schedule D, I probably won't be purchasing it after this year. Good Luck!
You cannot use IB's schedule d for two reasons: 1) It does not calculate wash sales and the IRS requires that you do. 2) If you have one other account at one other broker or even another account at IB you cannot use it because wash sales have to be calculated across all of your accounts. PS: In doing this for 6 years I have yet to see any broker who provides an accurate P&L for active traders. Time and time again we see errors in these reports and IB is no different. We have seen many discrepancies this tax year alone. This is a common question among our users when the results in TradeLog do not match with their brokers P&L results. Time and again we are proven to be right and the broker P&L is proven to be wrong. For those accounts that match, then OK, this may work (if you also have no wash sales and no other accounts). But if you rely on the broker P&L results you may be filing your taxes improperly and over or under stating your gains. Who wants to take such a chance with the IRS?
You are correct in that IB's schedule D does not account for wash sales. I have elected Mark-to-Market years ago and the wash sale rule does not apply to me.
I have been using trade log some time ago and it was realy amazing story. After one of "upgrades" this guy has changed in the program hard coded date format and it was not possible to download data any more beacuse program could not handle date properly. It was more than half a year until the exipiry of the subscription so actually he has stolen my money. How can you trust the calculation of taxes to the dilettante who is even unable to program proper handling of date format !
I am not sure what you refer to but if a broker changes their statement format then TradeLog has to issue an update to their import filter to handle the new formatting. An update is usually made available in a matter of days from the time we first hear about it. If we could no longer import from any of our 35+ supported brokers our phones would be ringing off the hook! If you had cared to check our update page or call or email us about the problem, it would certainly have been remedied and I do not appreciate your slur on our competence.
In your "support e-mail" the response was: we do not support this date format any more. And your response now only confirms that you dont understand what are you talking about. It's a local date format in europe and other customers may be were able to download data. I can only confirm that you lack min competence even to code usual handling of international date format. An you have stolen more than a half of my subscription. It's not only computer literacy but also credibility and integrity issue.
It is not that we all of a sudden do not support foreign windows date formats, but evidently you changed your windows date format to an unsupported format and now the import won't work, or your broker changed their date format and the conversion became broken. If you simply change to a standard US mm/dd/yyyy format you would have no problems. And contrary to popular belief, Microsoft does not always support their own international date formats by making this transparent to the software developer. Some formats convert automatically and some formats like dd/mm/yyyy do not. We have looked at recoding for this one particular eurpean date format (there may be others as well) but it is a monumental task because there is no easy way to check a text string as to whether the first two characters are a month or a day. So if Windows does not do the conversion for us, then we are dead in the water. If you want to discuss your particular issue this really in not the proper venue and you are welcome to contact me directly.
Since you use our TradeLog software I suspect that you really do not think manually entering your trades is the best method of keeping track of your trades. 1. If you manually enter your trade history you have many opportunities for errors. If you do 10 trades per day you have 60 chances of making an error in data entry. A minimum trade history entry requires a date, buy/sell, code, ticker, shares, price, and commission. 6 entries x 10 = 60 entries per day x 200 trading days = 12,000 chances for error! Importing your trade history from your broker is much more accurate. But every broker provides this data in a different format, and not all easily import into a spreadsheet without a lot of reformatting - more chances for errors. 2. OK, let's say you were able to manually enter everything accurately. Now you have to match these trades for the IRS schedule d. How would you match these transactions?: buy 1000 sh, sell 200 sh, sell 300 sh, buy 500 sh, sell 700 sh, sell 300 sh - More chances for errors! 3. Finally, how do you accurately apply the wash sale rule to all these trades? Yes, it is possible to do this by hand, but obviously it is much easier to purchase software to do so. Traders purchase many tools for their trading business. Tax tools are a necessity. The IRS rules for schedule d are extremely complex and only get more complex as you increase your trading. Have you ever wondered why TurboTax, which is part of a mutli billion dollar corporation, does not calculate wash sales? I am sure their marketing guys know there is a need for this. What about the brokers? Why don't they provide a schedule d with wash sales if it was so easy? Many have tried and many have failed. That's why they link to software such as TradeLog, because we provide the needed solution and are dedicated to doing this one thing right. Most of our users have found that TradeLog saves them days if not weeks of time when preparing their schedule d. How much is your time worth? But let's get back to the whole point of this thread: Our company was accused of just being "out to get your money." Good software is not cheap. You get what you pay for. We simply cannot provide the best software and the best service and give it away for free. If we did we would be out of business and our customers would be back to dealing with this issue by hand. Our loyal customers appreciate and respect that about us. - End of story.