Although I'm not a IB user, I use Datek along with Microsoft Money 2001. Gotta admit, MS Money really sucks when I have some days when I have several daytrades with several partial fills for each trade. MS Money really has a field day trying to reconcile some trades, especially when it's a series of stop and reverse type of trades intraday. In some situations, MS Money doesn't even import the data and gives me an error message, since it would cause the shares to go negative or some other weird reason. This occurs when Datek doesn't properly classify short trades. In those situations, I have to go back into my trading history, and figure out which trade needs to be entered/edited properly by hand so that the rest of the trades, which have already been downloaded, can continue to be imported. I could go on and on and on, but it's not the point of this email. I was wondering if anyone has looked at GTT Tradelog as an alternative to Quicken or MS Money? Someone posted the link on some other thread, but I don't think he got a response. It looks like the Holy Grail of tracking trades and more importantly, for automatically generating the proper tax documents (wash sales, schedule D, form 4797) and basic reports regarding your trading performance. http://www.armencomp.com/gtttradelog/ Under the FAQ->Competition section in the website above, they mention that Quicken and MS Money are just not supported (and who knows, may never be) for the small minority of active traders. They claim their $275 program will easily import IB's trade history .txt file you download, although folks like me using Datek will have to import using the copy/paste feature directly from the trading history web page. Not that big of a deal, although the data for the current trading day doesn't show up until the following day. http://www.armencomp.com/gtttradelog/import.shtml#IB Who knows, if you have hundreds or thousands of trades to reconcile during tax time, $275 may be a drop in the bucket in terms of saving huge amounts of time and headaches. I'm thinking of buying this program, so that's why I'm curious if anyone else has had any experience with it.
Looks like there's some overlap of this thread with the following below. http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2259&perpage=6&pagenumber=1
Does anyone know the current status of the IB export to Quicken functionality? Has IB fixed the problems they were having with exporting data to Quicken? -- ITZ
Quicken is so messed up, that there is only one way to enter your transactions correctly....and that is one at a time...forget automatic download because it isn't gonna work...and if it does...you'll spend the rest of your time justifying everything and correcting how it interprets short sales.....if however you enter your transactions daily and stay on top of things...it does download all your hundreds of transactions into Turbo Tax and on into your schedule D....as far as I know it does not automatically take care of wash sales....if your using the Mark to Market method of accounting this presents a whole new ball of wax. If you made the Mark to Market election, you should report all gains and losses from trading as ORDINARY gains and losses in Part II of form 4797, instead of as capital gains and losses on schedule D.....and right now I don't know if Turbo Tax or any other Tax software will automatically take that information and put it all on your 4797 form for you....if anybody knows of a complete tax preparation package that is geared towards traders ...please let me know.
I had a heck of time with Quicken download too. I found that Quicken can not match trader correctly if there are short sales. Quicken also have trouble with stock split. I ended up writtine a little Perl script to parse IB monthly statment and generate a QIF file, and then feed it into Quicken. Basically the script keeps tracks a portfolio based on all transactions, and tells Quicken a trade is a short sale if the stock being sold is not already in the portfolio. I hope IB can fix this problem nicely. If by next year's tax time it is still not fixed, I can polish my script a little bit so that everybody can use.