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Having just spent an entire frustrating day trying to reconcile my 2001
tradestation trades in order to finish my extension tax return, I want to
share my findings and see what the rest of you have done to simplify this
process.
Findings:
1. If you do more than one trade in a given security within a day, the
monthly TS Statement does not necessarily reflect the correct sequence or
type of trades within a day. For example, if you (1) short stock X , then
(2) cover the short and (3) go long, then (4) sell off the long position,
the statement may show that you shorted the stock, went long, sold off the
long position, then covered the short. Sometimes it mis-labels the trade
type, and sometimes it does not. If you enter an incorrect sequence into
Quicken 2002 (which now distinguishes between short trades and long trades),
it can make a mess of the capital gains report.
2. I was told by TS Support that the monthly Statement aggregates trades
within a single day and assigns an average price. This appears to be true of
individual trades filled in separate batches originating from a single trade
order, but it does not appear to be true of multiple round-trip trades
within the same day from separate trade orders.
3. I tried using the Excel-format download from the Client Toolkit to get
transactions in a machine-readable form, but it suffers from the same
sequencing ailment as the statements.
4. Paper confirmation slips are not much help reconstructing an accurate
trail of trades. They arrive days later in random order, and are not
time-stamped to show the sequence of trades occurring within a single day.
5. In the course of this, I finally discovered the historical trade list in
the Account Manager which you can copy and paste into Excel. This will give
you an accurate, time-stamped list of trades (only equities, not options,
though).
But, one still needs to get the trades into Quicken or other accounting
programs to match up buys & sells for a Schedule D Capital Gains report.
Has anyone on the list developed an Excel --> Quicken QIF conversion utility
that would allow me to get the trades into Quicken? I've requested this
several times with TradeStation, and was told that they "hope" to have this
feature in TradeStation 7 -- which is probably several months away.
How do the rest of you handle generating a capital gains schedule of your
TradeStation trades? If someone developed a utility to go straight from the
Historical Trade list dumped into Excel (as-is) and generate Quicken
transactions, I'd gladly spring for shareware type pricing. Here's an
opportunity for an enterprising programmer!
Rudy E.
Portland, ME
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