Trading tax software for last minute filers

Its tradelogs job to scare all to get more business. The irs doesn't know there ass from there elbow when it comes to traders taxes. BOTTOM LINE IS MAKE SURE YOUR TOTAL SALES ON
YOUR SCH D AT LEAST EQUALS YOUR 1099 TOTAL SALES AND ITS CASE CLOSED. do 1 line accounting and thats all you need. i've been filing 1 line accounting for 10 years and never 1 question. i use green and co's foot notes. LOOK IF TRADELOG IS SAYING YOUR OWN BROKERS NOT EVEN ACCURATE HOW THE HELL CAN YOU TRUST ANYONE'S #'S. the most accurate accounting is 1 line taking your starting year balance minus ending year balance and putting your deposits back in and minusing out all dividends and interest. ITS THE CASH IN YOUR ACCOUNT AND THE MOST ACCURATE ACCOUNTING. i've talked to many trader accountants and i've yet to hear anyone audited becasue they didn 't list all there trades
 
Quote from piggie2000:
do 1 line accounting and thats all you need. i've been filing 1 line accounting for 10 years and never 1 question....i've yet to hear anyone audited becasue they didn 't list all there trades
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It's free tax advice like this that gets traders in trouble with the IRS. Two years ago the IRS came on strong that you MUST enter all your trade details on schedule d and d-1 - see: http://www.edzollars.com/Schedule_D_Instructions_Email.pdf and http://www.nysscpa.org/trustedprof/206/tp4.htm

PS: The above does not include traders who have elected the Mark to Market method of accounting because such traders do not file a schedule d.

You may not have been audited yet, but if you keep doing it this way it is only a matter of time as one-line accounting does NOT meet the IRS requirements. And we have users who have been audited for this very reason. That's why Robert A. Green, CPA recommends our software.

I do agree that checking your starting balance against your ending balance (plus all the appropriate adjustments) is a good check to make sure your reported totals are correct and Green has been using this method for years. It does take a lot of work to do this however, especially when you have open positions at each end of the tax year, and is simpler to accomplish when you use software like TradeLog.
 
pigie2000,

My CPA lists all my trades, has done so for the past 12 years.
He does corporate as well as complex individual income taxation.
 
Evidently, from personal experience and this forum, TurboTax - working with a participating broker - has the same abilities to complete a Sch. D as Tradlog. I would think that Tradlog real value is if you want additional features to analyze portfolio performance.

Jeffrey
 

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Quote from piggie2000:

Its tradelogs job to scare all to get more business. The irs doesn't know there ass from there elbow when it comes to traders taxes. BOTTOM LINE IS MAKE SURE YOUR TOTAL SALES ON
YOUR SCH D AT LEAST EQUALS YOUR 1099 TOTAL SALES AND ITS CASE CLOSED. do 1 line accounting and thats all you need. i've been filing 1 line accounting for 10 years and never 1 question. i use green and co's foot notes. LOOK IF TRADELOG IS SAYING YOUR OWN BROKERS NOT EVEN ACCURATE HOW THE HELL CAN YOU TRUST ANYONE'S #'S. the most accurate accounting is 1 line taking your starting year balance minus ending year balance and putting your deposits back in and minusing out all dividends and interest. ITS THE CASH IN YOUR ACCOUNT AND THE MOST ACCURATE ACCOUNTING. i've talked to many trader accountants and i've yet to hear anyone audited becasue they didn 't list all there trades
More...

I disagree with you there. You need to report every trade to the IRS and you need to defer wash sales to the next year if you have them.

As far as tradelog it does what I need it to, I just hope that management learns that the recent complaints are to get better customer service. The software is great for what it does, but when someone has a problem, "the customer is always right" would be the best way to approach the situation. Then everyone is happy.
 
As for the disclaimer,

"Customers should verify the cost basis information provided by Fidelity against their own records when determining the appropriate cost basis to be used when calculating gains and losses for tax reporting purposes."

If this scares a person from doing their own taxes with TurboTax then the disclaimer as to the risk of stock trading would also prevent them from trading. I did not need to go through each monthly statement and manually match. It all matched automatically.

If your broker is not listed with TurboTax, then you would have to enter each transaction manually. If you have positions held overnight, and the broker does not figure wash-sales, you might want software such as Tradlog, or http://www.tradematcher.com or Gainskeeper to do sch D.
 
I have to go with tradelog & ricerocket here. A couple years ago, either I forgot to import a file from one of my brokers into turbotax or it didn't register, or whatever.

The result was reams of paper from the IRS listing every trade for which they did not have a match from my return with a deficiency notice to the tune of $1.2 million! The IRS simply assumed I had minted the stocks out of thin air & sold them with no cost basis.

It took an appeal to the taxpayer advocate & a revised schedule D, easily done by including the missing file, to get the IRS to back off.

You MUST report every single trade & properly account for wash sales or you WILL have major headaches. Use of gainskeeper, tradelog, or similar software is to my way of thinkng almost mandatory. Having used both, I strongly prefer gainskeeper for reasons I won't repeat. You could, of course do it by hand, but why would you want to?
 
thats ridiculous. you simply got a letter from the irs because your total sales didn't match up. THE IRS COMPUTERS MATCH YOUR TOTAL SALES AND SINCE YOU PROVIDED NO COST BASIS THE IRS COMPUTERS ASSUME ALL YOUR SALES ARE 100% PROFIT AND A TAX BILL IS GENERATED. MANY PEOPLE HAVE MADE THIS MISTAKE. actually that happens a lot when one doesn't file and the irs does your taxes for you based on there info.many brokers like think or swim offer gainskeeper at 25% off. i truely believe the irs will force brokers to provide sch's as the irs is losing 10's of billions because of cheating.
 
Quote from Jeffrey:
Evidently, from personal experience and this forum, TurboTax - working with a participating broker - has the same abilities to complete a Sch. D as Tradlog. I would think that Tradlog real value is if you want additional features to analyze portfolio performance.
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I beg to differ with Jeffrey, you cannot trust the import from Fidelity into TurboTax and I would like to illustrate this with a real life example:

A trader with only 177 trade transactions from 2007 imported his 2007 trades into TurboTax. There were no missing cost basis trades to deal with and everything flowed perfectly into TurboTax. Both Fidelity and TurboTax reported a net loss of $1,909.87. Basically TurboTax took the Fidelity G/L data verbatim.

The same trader imported from his Fidelity account into TradeLog after manually entering his 2 positions carried open from 2006, and TradeLog calculated a net gain of $3,392.01. The user was able to see each and every trade that he made throughout the year in the exact order that he traded them, verified his open positions at year end and reconciled to his 1099 to the penny! TradeLog also properly calculated his wash sales and no losses were disallowed for 2007 and deferred to 2008.

see: http://www.armencomp.com/images/Fidelity_TurboTax.gif

We found many mistakes in the Fidelity P&L statement, too many to list, but we have isolated one that was easy to spot for Altria Group (MO) where the trader held 257 shares open from 2006 and where Fidelity did not pick this up. The same was true for his other open position on ISRG. When open positions are missing from the G/L statement it throws off the trade matching for the entire statement as the IRS requires FIFO trade matching unless you specifically ID lots when you sell them.

The real problem here is that there is NO WAY for this trader to know that something was wrong! Since Turbotax does not do any sort of open positions analysis at year end, there is no way for the trader to spot such problems. In addition, there is no easy way to insert your open positions and then rematch everything after you do. Once rematched, the wash sale calculations may change drastically.

Now Jeffrey may not have any of these problems, but the point I am trying to make is that there is no way to know unless you use professional grade trade accounting software, or manually check each and every buy and sell and compare how it is matched on the Fidelity G/L report.

I am not saying this to scare anyone, I am merely stating the facts of the matter. Traders simply cannot rely on their broker provided G/L statements. It is an industry wide problem that has been acknowledged by many brokerages, yet that has not stopped them from providing such inaccurate reports.
 
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