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You may be able to attach your brokerage 1099 electronically to your return and just report the summary numbers from it. Ask your CPA. Alternatively, you can see about downloading the transaction details for Form 8949 from your broker, which should have the taxable trade level details...

Broad based equity indexes and options on those are sec 1256 for tax purposes. I don't know firsthand, but it's possible SPX options would be 1256 but SPY ones wouldn't (treating SPY as an equity). https://greentradertax.com/trader-tax-center/tax-treatment/section-1256-contracts/ Hopefully...

It's in the name - LP is for limited partner. These are publicly traded partnerships, and often refer to "units" rather than shares. You get a K1 if you owned it. http://ir.blackstone.com/investors/tax-information/default.aspx

IB is right. Download the form 8949 data from IB and you can see the cost basis for these non-covered securities. If they look right, you can give TT the correct basis associated with those transactions.

What's wrong with margin? Don't all you elite traders want to get rich quickly instead of slowly? :).

Here I thought this post was going to be able how people can forget your bad trades and remember your good ones once you're gone.

Thanks everyone, and JackRab especially. I had been meaning to update my java memory allocation since the recent update and thanks to this discussion I was able to do it easily. Hopefully that'll solve my one-restart-midday issues.

The nearer maturity bonds are not trading that far below par - mid 90s for the 2018, mid 80s for the 2019s. The stuff around 2030 is in the 40s, much more speculative.

JackRab - thanks for the details, I will give the Java memory setting a try as I think the command line settings no longer work as of a little while ago for increasing that. Following up on my post above about charts leaking memory, I often review lots of charts one at a time over the weekend...

I'm not sure if options are meaningfully different (don't trade those really), but I have a lot more lines of stocks and stock charts than you and I don't think I noticed anything worse than usual in the recent days. But it's hard to say. Check out some of the threads here on allocating more...

Guaranteed VWAP orders: https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php?f=603 Cost a bit more though.

If you notice any sort of slowness or unresponsiveness, it's probably best to close and restart at a time of your choosing. I find if you open a chart, especially a full screen chart, that seems to leak a little memory. A couple dozen of those throughout the day and it might need a restart...

Sure, and MF Global looked good until Corzine started punting on Eurozone debt with customer money. But IB isn't an investment bank or a prop shop, and to the extent they have any exposure from non-customer blowups, it's probably in their options market making group which is being scaled back...

Do you know how much surplus capital IB has on hand? It's worth looking up.

You can add "secondary" stock series to the chart, either other tickers or indexes for comparison. Check under chart settings.

If you're below the initial margin requirement but above the maintenance one (so no margin call, yet), you can sell things but may not be able to buy different ones if the sale doesn't free up enough equity to put you over the initial margin limit. Or you might be able to buy some but not all...

Is it possible that putting on a risk reducing position in a PM account may have the same effect as selling some of the losing long holding? In this way, you could potentially reduce your margin call by buying puts on your long position if it resulted in reducing your margin requirements rather...

TDA offers ESA accounts. $2k/year and are taxfree (like Roth IRAs) when spent on education. These are kinda like iras so you can probably get covered options permission if you ask. Many brokers offer these, if you prefer another.

They wouldn't buy the 0.99 of a share, instead just be short 0.01 to you. Once you buy over 0.5, then it's less risk to actually buy it. Just don't ask to vote your half a share and no one will care how it actually works behind the scenes.

Maybe if you did more volume at IB they'd answer your call ;).