I’m considering to purchase a new software application which shall help me on following items :
keep track of my trades, Stocks, Options, ETF’s, US and European / German exchanges
( preferably through import of monthly statements from my broker, IB )
process trade tickets / Statements in multiple currencies
( at least EUR, USD )
generate various portfolio reports
( composition, sectors, industries, asset classes, performance in various periods , risk analysis etc. )
generate annual P/L statements for tax authorities
( automated washsale rule calculations not necessary - doesn’t exist in Germany )
I found some offers at the IB website, but either they are too expensive ( one is 2K + annual updates ) , cannot deal correctly with trades in multiple currencies, have other limitations I don’t want to accept.
Most of the german products I know of cannot handle trades in other currencies then EUR or are not able to import the monthly statements I get from IB.
Currently working with MS Money / Omnitraders Portfolio function. MS Money ( US Version ) is not bad, but has sometimes it’s problems with correct importing of IB data.
Windows XP Pro Serv.Rel. 2
Which applications do you use or would you recommend ?
Shouldn’t be too expensive, I’m not ( yet ) a hedgefund manager
IB supports following formats with their monthly statements :
HTML, MS Word, Excel, MS Money, Quicken, CapTools and Gainskeeper.
I actually bought a copy a couple of days ago but I do not know how soon I will have time to install it and play with it. It claims it does all of: tracking the portfolio and comparing it to benchmarks by simply importing the downloads from your account, preparing Schedule D.
I use quicken - but when large market orders get broken up in several blocks it seems to get a bit confused - at least I think that is the problem. I only use the basic features so I can’t tell you how the other stuff works.
Vlad, thanks for letting me know what you think about Quicken. I assume, you use the US Version.
German version of Quicken ( Lexware ) is unfortunately not able to import QIF Files and the Portfolio-Module uses a german Stockquote provider who offers only quotes from german exchanges ( all foreign and national stocks, ETF’s and mutual funds though )
To Charley :
Charley, thanks for your help.
Is this the only problem you have with Quicken ?
I use so few of the features I can’t tell if there are other problems. So, I didn’t like it when my version becoame outdated and I had to buy the new upgrade for it to continue to work.
I used Quicken several years ago but I ran into a problem after I had entered maybe a hundred transactions. Something in the database got corrupted and I wasn’t able do anything with it after that. I gave up on the product.
I am not using any S/W right now. I am trading mostly in a tax sheltered account and don’t need to track those trades for tax purposes. For trading outside the tax sheltered account my broker sends a summary of all trades at the end of the year. And then I do currency conversion since I live in Canada. I haven’t been doing that much trading in the last few years since the tech bubble burst so keeping track isn’t too difficult.
I will probably want to find a S/W package now since I expect to increase frequency of trading with Portfolio123.
Hey Steve, amazing to find someone from Stittsville on here. I’m in Kanata and used to work in Stittsville for almost 7 years.
Anyhow, how are you finding the trading outside of Canada going? I’m with waterhouse still and getting killed with commisions. It’s to bad Foliofn won’t take us without a us address
Who are you using out of curiousity? How has your success been with them and with port123?
I have been doing everything in Excel. It is tedious, but it works. I have looked for something better, but it seems there is always a problem with every product. I would end up putting lots of stuff in manually with any product I have evaluated.
With Excel, I can always find a way to get the report I want or take care of new situations. That may not be possible with most canned software.
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Last Night I deleted my trading account on Quicken 2005 and re-downloaded the account data with more than an entire year of data from schwab… I was able to make a nice Capital Gains report using Quicken ( 12 pages with about 36 tranactions a page). The short term and long term totals were seperated in the report. The results are very close to my EXCEL spread sheet and I can use it to check my EXCEL results. It took several hours for Quicken to crunch everything out but it seems to have done it.
interesting to hear that at least something seems to work. I think, I’ll give Quicken a try. They offer the 2006 deLuxe edition ( US ) with 60 day money back guarantee, if I’m not mistaken.
Of the hundreds of transactions there were a couple problems two were with a stock involved in a tender offer, another (DKHR - D & K Health care ) I find only the buy and my records but no trace of a sell and it is not in my holdings, don’t know what happened to it - these were reported under long term gains and had sell date which pre dated the buy for some reason. The other 4 or five problems are expired options. Quicken creates a “palce holder” for the ticker when it can not match the buy/sells, I have gone through and corrected these by hand, except for DKHR which seems to have dissappered from my holdings. It is also possible to export the entire report from Quicked to a excel compatible file.
I am not too sure about currency issues, but TRADELOG is the best app I have seen. It imports data from most major brokerage houses. I use it with IB and it makes my life pretty simple come tax time.
Tradelog won’t work on a Mac. I use GainsKeeper (gainskeeper.com) and have found it very useful. It tracks splits, name changes, sched. D etc. I think there is a free trial and some brokerages offer a discount for the first year.
