How accurate is IB's T5008?

Hello Canadian traders,

Based on your experiences, how accurate is IB's T5008 reporting. Specifically for Cost and Proceeds (boxes 20 and 21).

Due to open positions at year end, my marked to market pnl for the year is significantly different than what i see on the T5008. Can we just trust it to be correct assuming its correctly taking into consideration only closed trades; or will i have to check trade by trade? which will be bummer.

Does CRA let us report on MTM basis; just real difference of account value at year end; much simpler and easy to verify and validate. Anyone report as such? From what i can read online, i havent seen any reference to reporting on mtm basis.


thanks in advance!
-gariki

 

Excellent question. I just called them about this very same thing. The first thing is that in my case, all positions are closed at the end of each day, so I'm not sure how open positions affect anything. My guess would be that if you still have an open position and the profit/loss hasn't been taken, then there is no associated capital gain/loss or profit/loss depending on which category your trading goes into.

What the guy told me on the phone is that this number doesn't include the last day, Dec 31. In my case, I had losses on this day, so even when I added up my monthly statements for the year, this number didn't match the number on the T5008. Also, this number is apparently already in Canadian dollars, even though the futures I trade are in US dollars, and I have no idea what exchange rate they use or how they calculate this. Its my first year so this is all rather new to me.

My hunch is that its best to just report the number on the T5008 so as not to attract attention. Reporting the current value of open positions just doesn't seem appropriate from a revenue canada standpoint since those will obviously change when the trade is closed. Only once the trade is closed can you actually get a value for a gain/loss. But its just a hunch, based on no firm info.

 

CRA doesn't care, because it will balance out from year to year. I'm with BMO Investorline and I don't wait the 2 months to receive the T5008 to do my taxes, I create my own T5008 from the TransactionHistory.CSV which is updated daily and ready by January 1st. Sometimes there is a small discrepancy between my T5008 and BMO's T5008 because I use the transaction date while BMO uses the settlement date. But from year to year it is OK.


If you find IB's T5008 not to your liking then create your own customized T5008 and send that to the CRA. The CRA will not question it if it's close to what IB sends them.

 

Thanks for the replies folks. After looking at the split between realized pnl and unrelaized gains, the numbers did all match up quite nicely with what my mtm values are.

So all good.

Thanks.