bones1420: Taxes, Schd D
I use Quicken each day to enter my trades and track my portfolio performance over time. It's good to have a complete 20 year history of every trade I ever made. Quicken now allows you to import daily trades directly from your broker but I still do the entries manually because of the way my Quicken accounts are setup. At tax time Quicken is compatible with Turbo tax and you do a quick export of the year's trades and get a complete schedule D.
But I've been old fashioned, at least until this year, by manually aggregating trades where the sale occurred the same day but the purchases spanned different days. The IRS allows you to put 'VARIOUS' for the purchase date. So I do the 1040 entirely by hand, though Quicken does the preparatory work for me. I've always favored submitting a handwritten 1040 since I suspect it may reduce the chances of an audit (not that I have anything to hide, but nonetheless an audit would be a nuisance at the least). A typewritten copy can easily be scanned and analysed by computer, whereas a handwritten copy cannot be handled so efficiently. Of course, it's even possible that the reverse is true, and that an audit is more likely of a handwritten 10K, but it sure is easier for them to process the typewritten one's, so I think a greater percentage of those get audited.
Nonetheless with about 1600 trades in 2004, which aggregate to about 420 with 'VARIOUS' purchase dates, I don't relish the thought of spending perhaps 10 hours to handwrite 20+ pages of Sched 'D'. This year they may be getting a typewritten version from turbotax. However I did write a simple 'post processor' which reads the Quicken export file and aggregates the trades as I have done manually before importing them into turbotax, so I'll be reporting just 420 entries, rather than the full 1600. I figure, don't given them more information than they're asking for.
Anyway, how are you frequent traders handling your portfolio tracking and schedule D's ?
