Anyone considering Tradestation for retail trading, consider this. They will entice you with good rates (for a retail firm), a powerful trading platform, and support. They will also leave you hanging when it comes time to deal with the tax accounting nightmare that active retail trading is. It is now March, and it is STILL not possible to download 2004 tax info from Tradestation into your trade accounting software. I understand the same thing happened last year (Thank God I didn't trade with them in 2003). I tried them because I wanted to check out their software, but they can't seem to manage a simple download process for your previous year trade data. I'm going to do all my active trading with my prop firm this year, and avoid the tax accounting hassle of retail, of which Tradestation is the worst.
IMO, TS can be described as good software , amateurish brokerage. I still can't do my taxes because I can not dl my 2004 trades. DS
Is the info not available, or not in a format to put into your taxes? I had to get after one broker who was late with mine, and I believe was illegal in not having them out by the 31st of jan. Does TS send a hard copy or is only online copy available?
I haven't tried this yet, but here's suggestion. Get your historical trades out of the TradeManager -> Orders tab. It allows you to pull down your historical orders there. One problem is that it doesn't detail your comission, but you can calc that in excel. Either way I feel your pain. I tried to do my taxes this past weekend, but had to put them off because of this...
The hard-copy statement required to be filed with your taxes is mailed out on time. The problem is, I have never seen a retail brokerage that puts it into a usable format. They all do the minimum, which is to report the trades, but not match them and show total profit/loss. YOU need to match the trades and arrive at the profit/loss figure, and report it with your tax return. Many traders use software to accomplish this. I use Tradelog, but there are others. I have had several retail brokerage accounts and every one of them has an online data download feature that can be used to import data into Tradelog. It just isn't feasible to enter the trades into the software manually (I have better things to do with 20-30 hours of time). With Tradestation, they will currently allow you to download data through 1/31/2004. That gets me 1/12th of my data! There is another issue I will briefly mention. Many retail traders have stated on ET in previous tax seasons, that they DO NOT report each individual trade to the IRS. Instead, they attach something to the effect of "further trade detail available upon request". I just don't feel comfortable doing that, as a tax attorney and two CPAs have advised me that it isn't sufficient.
This information regarding TradeStation is from TradeLog's website: "Feb 25, 2005: We are still waiting for the final release of the 2004 Tax Download - Tradestation has informed us that it is in final test. The procedure below will work, however, for tax years 2002 and 2003." [.... continues on TradeLog's website] I can download all trades from 2002 and 2003 for importing into TradeLog, Excel, Quicken, GainsKeeper, Microsoft Money, TradeAccountant. I can't download 2004 info from trade dates 2/01/2004 (provided a year ago to do wash sales calculations) to 9/10/2004 (which is around when TradeStation switched from Bear to self-clearing). TradeStation's "Tax Information" tab states: "Enter trade dates between 1/1/2002 and 1/31/2004." That excludes 11 months of 2004. For trades that took place between February and mid-September, TradeStation's "Trades and Other Transactions" tab states: "No information is available for the selected date range." I am surprised that more people do not seem to be impacted by this issue. Anyone have any insight into when TradeStation will make all 2004 trades available to be electronically downloaded? Any TradeStation employees have any insight?
I anticipated this mid year and just manually entered my trades on excel. It takes a whopping 5 minutes a day. Now I have a pretty spread sheet in "schedule D format" This is why I now trade futures! What a shame TradeStation can not get their act together. Cyber/Schwab lets you create these beautiful Pdf's which are IRS compliant. I feel bad for anybody that traded all year with them and has 1000's of trades. Call/e mail someone on the TRAD Board, there is no excuse for this.
ITS ABOUT TIME! Dear Valued Client, Trading activity through January 31, 2005 is now available to download in formats compatible with popular financial software packages* via the TradeStation Support Center: http://www.tradestation.com/support. We thank you for your patience. Sincerely yours, The TradeStation Team * Available in all versions of Quicken, except Quicken 2005.
Better late, than being worthless forever. It's due to the change from Bear Stearns clearing to self clearing, I would guess. I dumped them last fall, after going self clearing, ....nice that they wait last minute to get this fix in. Really glad I dumped them now. EVEN AMERITRADE has better tax reporting x TENFOLD! How sad. Still holds up our taxes. THANKS GUYS.