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After the trouble I went through it, I may as well share this with some of us who use InteractiveBrokers (with trading signal from omega, of course!).
IB reports the trade statement in details. For example, let's say, you buy 500 shares of MSFT. The statement may report Supersoes 200 shares, ARCA 155 shares, Island 145 share.
IB allows the flexibility of combining buy and buy to cover, or sell and sell short. For example, if you are long 500 shares of MSFT, and you think it's going down and want to go short, you can simply sell 1000 shares. This will close you 500 shares long position and open a 500 shares short position all at the same time, saving time and commission.
Because of the above, you may face a few issues filing trades for tax purpose. First, importing IB's QIF data into accounting software (e.g. Quicken) and generating TXF file is tedious. Matching trade is even more so. Second, when you generate the TXF and import it into a tax program (e.g., TurboTax), you will may find many small trades. Plus, the long format from Quicken is not what a trader wants. Instead of "DD 200 SH" in the description, you may get "200.000 DU PONT E I DE NEMOURS & CO". More importantly, at the end of the process, the total capital gain/loss on your tax software does not match the number from IB.
I wasted enough time on it, but I did not want to manually type in all the trades. Finally, I went to someone who knows programming, and the basic TXF format, and a little bit of trading. "Here is my yearly IB statement in HTML format. Combine and spilt the trades as you see fit. Just give me the TXF file for importing into TurboTax and make sure the capital gain/loss numbers match." That did it.
PS: This is not a complaint about IB. In fact, I personally like IB: good execution speed, low commission, good fill, most of the time.
hc
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