PS: I would love to hear your comments about wash sales between stocks and options trades and between options and options.
My competitor alternately encourages users to find a service that will back up your data, then states that customers do not want their data held by a third party. The ability to download reports and manage data off of our servers was as quick and efficient on April 13th as it is today. I challenge anyone top find an example of a customer who saw a reduction in the speed of data retrieval at or near the end of tax season. I can tell you right now with complete confidence that THIS DID NOT HAPPEN. We actually have the capacity to handle exponentially more data and users requests than could ever be made by users of the retail product. This criticism is invented, GainsKeeper has not had any issues because of increased activity during the end of tax season. It is laughable for our competitor to say that you are better off manually entering in Corporate Actions when GainsKeeper owns CCH (the corporate action information database that the IRS uses to verify that you have processed Corporate actions correctly) and uses CCH to post these events to your account. The reason why our competitor exists is to provide a service that seeks to automate and avoid human error, then encourages you to manually input the most complex transactions of all? I am going to have to step away now as many of the Elitetrader users participating in this thread would like to discuss the options available to them to move to GainsKeeper and recoup any expense paid out to a competitor product. Please feel free to reach out to me so we can discuss signing you up for GainsKeeper. Thanks, Steve
That's not quite what I said. What I said was EVERYONE should back up the data on their PC! Doing so using a local removable device such as as CD, DVD, hard drive, or memory stick is preferred by users who do not want to have their data stored by a 3rd party. But the web option exists if you don't care about who has access to your data. That's funny, because a few years back I was approached at Traders Expo by one of the GK founders about potentially providing TradeLog to their client base for exactly that reason. All I can say is calculating thousands, or even millions of wash sale calculations can tax the most robust back office systems. It is simply a matter of CPU power versus demand. But if it has been fixed by throwing tons of CPU power at it, then good for them. Since this happens so infrequently it has not been a problem. TradeLog has a one click adjust for stock split function, and a change ticker function when a stock changes name. Mergers require a few more adjustments, but are accomplished quite easily. But if you carried positions for many years and have a boat load of mergers and name changes, then such a service might be for you. But do you know for sure it was done right? The beauty of TradeLog is it forces you to check and verify such edits to your data. We have never pushed TradeLog as a corporate actions or cost basis tracking solution, as a perfect solution to this does not currently exist. This is a major flaw in the brokerage reporting industry and you can find lots of comments about this on reputable financial web sites. The whole point of TradeLog is to automate the most important things like importing your trades, matching them properly, and accurately accounting for wash sales. Oops, our competitor forgot to address their deficiency in this critical area. PS: Many of our users who have switched to us did not do so because of some Pepsi challenge rebate, but because we represent the best value for the buck and provide exceptional support. I am not quite sure why our competitor has waited so long to address the phone support issue, but all I can say is it has been good for us.
This is a cut and paste from my broker's website regarding gainskeeper: Why in the world would my broker tell me to NOT use gainskeeper for tax purposes???
Tradelog, you currently don't cover Genesis. Is there any possibility that you may do so? I like your product but if it doesn't cover a prominent broker like Genesis, then it's not worth paying the yearly fees that you charge and then have to manually match and reconcile trades for some of the more noteworthy brokers that you don't cover.
I believe Genesis clears thru Penson Financial and you may be able to use our Penson import filter. Please get the free trial to test for yourself.
. Actually, they are self-clearing and also clear through PFS. Unfortunately, my account is with their self-clearing program. So, it would be a waste of money to use tradelog for my needs unless you happen to acquire an import filter for Genesis's self-clearing segment. Thanks anyway.
You must be new to the financial markets. Ever read a Corporate 10-Q Filing and all of the super conservative and "negative" language? The last paragraph that you cite ( from Scottrade ) is simply a legal way of not being held legally liable for any accounting/tax inaccuracies.
Signed up for gainskeeper. It treaded expired options, assigned options (call or put) as it should after following steps required to clean up extra trades from my broker. Also took care of one corporate action (NCC becomng PNC). It woked fine for a broker with Penson as clearing firm since no exporting is required. The only issue is it can not connect with Interactive Brokers and IB also does not have file format to export which would let you import it in gains keeper. Overall happy with the product. Hoping to get IB issue resolved.
I use TradeLog and think the program is great. It saves me a lot of time during tax time. I especially like the wash sale feature. The only problem that I had was that I couldn't put forex trades into it. I handled those transactions separately in an Excel spreadsheet.