Owing to the pressure of honing my golf game during the summer months (well, one has to keep one's priorities straight ) I have got woefully behind in my trade record-keeping. Does anyone have a method, or better still, for example, a spreadsheet macro, for matching and recording trades from the monthly trading summary sheet? Any other recommendations for record-keeping from IB's daily e-mails that is less tedious than doing it by hand?
I use excel. The records can be imported at a .txt file with the columns intact. You can then sort the records by date or symbol.
I use "Captools Global Investor" (captools.com) which handles about any type transactions in all major currencies. I import the IB Execution files into Captools. Captools combines the Tax Lots from all of my brokerage accounts and prints out my IRS schedule "D". The software cost me $400 and has been worth the cost. Catoosa
Would somone go thru the steps on how to do this please? I am new with IB and all I get is an email in my box. How do you export that? Thanks in advance.
I am not sure which method you are referring to. I expect the commercial software some people have discussed has full instructions. Thanks to those who suggested these packages. I currently use Excel for my record keeping. Getting the data in there is easy, manipulating it to match buys and sells is very tedious. I was hoping someone had come up with a macro to do that part. I work from the monthly email of trade data. Highlight the section that lists the trades. Right click and "copy". Open notepad and paste the data. Save the resulting document as a text file, say Sept01.txt. Open Excel and select "Open" from the file menu. This will take you to a browse box. Select the directory where you saved the file and highlight the file. Choose "text files" as the file type and click open. This will open a Text Import Wizard that lets you define the type of data in each column and which columns to import. I do not import the column that designates a partial fill, for example. When you have stepped through the various steps, "Finish" will result in your data being imported as a spreadsheet. You can then match up buys and sells by cutting and pasting. When done, use "Save As..." to save the file with a spreadsheet . You have to specify this format at that time. You can then print your trades or do any spreadsheet analysis that you like on the data.
I did not think that the email was a comma limited file. The folks using commercial software like tradelog mention importing. I did not want to buy the software before I findout more and their (tradelog) site don't even show an example.
goodQ: âI did not think that the email was a comma limited file.â True, although the email can easily be imported into Excel and formatted. In addition, IB TWS can export a copy of your daily executions in a delimited format. âtheir (tradelog) site don't even show an example.â TradeLog offers an importing Users Guide: http://www.armencomp.com/tradelog/import.shtml âThanks Gus.â Dufferdon is Don. He is only quoting Gustave LeBon. My apologies if you were joking.