This is for all you seasoned IB JTWS users and active traders alike. When you do hundreds (if not thousands) of trades per month, how do you keep track of gains and losses for the tax? Can anyone recommend a good tax program that calculates gain or loss from the Execution data exported from JTWS? When you have thousands of Execution data, I think automation is the key, and it should require minimum amount of manual data entry into the program. With this much data, I don't think MS Excel would be very helpful -- or is there anyone using it?
Take a look at Tradelog (http://www.armencomp.com/tradelog/). Since there's no capital gains tax where I currently live I'm not using it for tax purposes but as a general trade accounting and analysis tool. They started supporting IB's statement format a couple months ago. Unfortunately, IB does not flag short sales as such on their daily and monthly statements. But other than that it works perfectly.
My undersatnding is that if you elect marked to market accounting, you don't need to document all your trades. You just take the difference between your balances at the beginning of the year vs end of the year, and the difference is your profit (loss).
That's correct mjt. But, does anyone know how you report futures trades if you are M2M? Is there any difference?
Dustin, Futures are automatically marked to market each day, so I do not believe any special election is needed. I think it is treated as short-term capital gains for tax purposes, but no itemization of trades is required. There may be others here who can better clarify this, but that is my understanding. Kirk
Hello Again, Well I think I've done about 1000 more trades with IB, and I am still very impressed with the execution speed and quality using ECNs on NASDAQ and BEST on NYSE stocks. Also, overall I like the Page user model better than CyberCorp's CyberX2 application because the JTWS lets you stage many orders together. However, in practice, there are some useability problems and some rough edges on the UI. Here are some more painful problems. *) Annoying delayed deletion of executed order rows from Pages I tend to trade based on market direction, so I tend to enter orders in bunches at the same time. I usually enter positions in several stocks to spread my risk. One problem I have is when an order row is deleted, the table row with the focus is not preserved. So if row 20 has the focus, and all the rows shift up because row 2 was deleted, now the row previously 21 is now where row 20 was and it now has the focus. The real annoyance is that right when I am am transmitting 10+ orders, these rows start getting removed sometimes right when I am pressing the transmit on another order. A couple times today I executed about 20 orders one right after another, and I basically couldn't do anything once the orders started to delete themselves. I had to wait for table rows to stop shifting up and down. I would prefer to not have these orders disappear automatically after some delay, but instead have a button or HotKey we can press to clean up executed orders. *) Page management I normally trade a variety of stocks, so I am constantly adding and deleting symbols to my Page. There are several simple things which could be done to make the management of the Page table easier. -) Cancel HotKey is nice, however even better would be a 'Delete Row' HotKey which would have the following effect based on the contents of the row. +) Order => Same as CancelOrder +) Contract => cancel all order rows under this contract, and delete contract row +) Empty => DeleteRow -) Losing Focus When cancelling an order, the focus should remain on the row. Right now if I have 10 orders under a contract and I select the first order, and then press the Cancel HotKey, the order is cancelled, but now no order is selected. So if I want to Cancel all 10 orders, I have use the mouse to select each one then press Cancel HotKey. I should be able to just select the first order, then press Cancel 10 times to cancel all the orders. -) Allow ability to Sort the contracts alphabetically. Right now I manually keep the contracts sorted alphabetically because I find that the fastest way to find a symbol on a page. The problem is sometimes I get in a hurry durring the day and add symbols all over the page. It is a major pain to reorganize the symbols in alphabetical order. *) Allow us to configure the behavior of the MouseClicks on the Bid/Ask Price. Right now, it creates a Sell Order when you click Bid Price and a Buy Order when you click AskPrice. Almost 90% of the time I want the opposite. Can IB make this configurable? An alternative is to provide HotKeys that would toggle the Action (BUY,SELL,SSHRT). Since I usually adjust the limit price and transmit the order with HotKeys, it would be easy for me to hit another key to toggle the Order Action. Right now I have click Bid/Ask Price, then click the OrderAction dropdown list and to change the Action. Those dropdown lists are cumbersome.. *) Suggestion: Instead of dropdown comboboxes for Time In Force (DAY,GTC) and Action (BUY,SELL,SSELL) please consider multi-state togglebuttons. Togglebuttons are much quicker to manipulate than a combobox dropdown list!!! With a dropdown list I have to click the cell to make the list drop, then move the cursor and click on the correct menu item. With a togglebutton, I juck click once or twice on the cell. Much faster! However, togglebuttons really only work when there are only 2 or 3 choices. The Type field (LMT,MKT,STP, STP LM) wouldn't work as well. Even faster would be to support HotKeys to set these fields as I mentioned above. *) As I mentioned before, it would be nice to be able to customize which fields are displayed for a contract. I would not show Bid Size and Ask Size, and instead show my current account position and current gain/loss on that position. *) I find myself keeping the Account Information window on the screen so that I can see my positions. However, 99% of the time I never look at the lefthand side of the screen which lists Stock Market Value, Cash Balance, etc. What I usually do is move the window so that lefthand side is offscreen so it doesn't wast space. However, the position list itself wastes alot of space. It looks like ABC 1000 XYZ 500 There is alot of whitespace between the Contract name and the symbol. You can't seem to resize like you can the Pages.
the latest release notes --- notably, you will be able to quickly route to the ECN/Exchange of your choice.... Trader Workstation Version 4.06 Release Notes Effective April 3, 2001: Under the Window Titles Bar of the TWS screen, the "Destination" column has been renamed "Exchange". When creating an order, the "Exchange" column will display a drop-down listing of each exchange or ECN where that product is available. This allows you to quickly select order destination. Each time the Trader Workstation logs into the system, the TWS will download a complete set of execution reports listing any executions that occurred while the TWS was logged off. This information will be available in the execution window.
Def thanx for the info. is this for the Java workstation only or also for the installation one also? eli
Def: I downloaded the standalone JTWS, upgraded it and still dont have the features you described. Also, I loaded the Internet-ran JTWS and same thing. Seems as if IB hasnt released this JTWS 4.06 upgrade. Can you please investigate this, a drop down box for execution routes would be a major improvement in order routing speed and screen space efficiency and also is a good sign that IB is hearing its customer's requests. hsanson