TradeLog™ Features / Benefits
Please note of some of the "special features" found in TradeLog™ but not found in many of our competitor's software:
Special Features: |
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| Feature: | Benefit: |
| Auto-Assign Short Sales |
If your broker does not flag short sales on online trade history reports, TradeLog™ will automatically assign short sales upon import. If a sale of a particular ticker symbol is imported, and no shares are currently open for that particular ticker, then TradeLog™ will assume that the sale is short. Then when a corresponding buy is imported, the shares are matched and used to close the trade. |
| Convert Short/Long with One Transaction |
For those brokerage accounts that allow their clients to convert a short position to long with a single transaction, TradeLog™ will automatically make the conversion as broker trade history reports are imported. |
| Match Tax Lots |
Active traders who execute a number of trades each day need a quick and easy way to group their trades in specific tax lots. TradeLog™ now has a special feature that enables the user to select and match trades into an individual tax lot with a few clicks of the mouse! |
| Get Current Pricing on Open Positions |
The "Open Positions" works as a portfolio manager to allow the user to completely price all open positions and see unrealized gains for stocks, options and futures! |
| Expire Options |
For those brokers who do not record option exercises and expirations in their trade history, TradeLog™ will automatically find all open options, evaluate the option expiration versus the current date, and if the option has expired, create a closing transaction for each one to close out the option at zero cost. |
Importing: |
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| Feature: | Benefit: |
| Imports directly from online broker's web site | Fast imports with a minimum of mouse clicks. Simply select the entire report and click the Import speed button on the toolbar. |
| Does not require Excel spreadsheets | No need to reformat trade data using MS Excel or other spreadsheet software. Import filters are customized to the broker trade history reports that we support, and only the pertinent trade data is imported. All extraneous data is filtered out upon import. |
| Does not rely on OFX |
OFX is a banking specification for online transactions. It is extremely complex and therefore has limited support by online brokers. This is the primary import facility used by personal finance software programs (such as Quicken and MS Money) and is part of the reason why they are so limited in supporting active traders. Most online brokers do not have an OFX server, and those that do may severely limit your ability to access your historical trade data. Most limit access to the last 90 days. The result? If you did not import your trade history regularly throughout the tax year, you have no way to obtain your trade history. By supporting trade history imports from the Account Services section of your broker's web site, TradeLog™ allows you to access as much trade data as possible. Many brokers provide historical trade data for at least the last two years, and some go back much further. |
| No limit on number of records imported | TradeLog™ can handle thousands of transactions per import. Many online brokers provide an entire year's worth of trading data on one report which can be imported with just a few clicks of your mouse! Any import limitations are due to your online broker, and not due to our import filters. |
| Expired options | Expired and exercised options are imported and recorded if your broker lists them in your trade history reports. If your broker does not list these transactions, TradeLog™ has a one-click Expire Options function which automatically finds all open option trades in a data file and determines whether or not these options have expired. For each expired option, a closing transaction is automatically entered at a price of zero. If a specific option cannot be expired due to a discrepancy with the ticker description, a closing transaction can be quickly entered by the user. |
Product Info:
In an age of scaled back support, we feel that our customers deserve to speak with a live person.
Trade Matching: |
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| Feature: | Benefit: |
| Properly matches short and long trades | There are many brokers who do not flag whether a trade is short or long. TradeLog is one of the only software programs that has an "auto-assign shorts" function that properly identifies short sales using strict first-in first-out (FIFO) trade matching as required by the IRS. If a sell trade record is imported and at that point in time you have nothing open in that particular instrument, then TradeLog automatically flags the trade as short. Since most brokers provide their trade history data in exact order of execution, it is a simple thing for TradeLog to properly report your short sales without getting any mismatch errors. For those brokers who flag short trades in their reports, TradeLog meticulously matches these as reported. Since no broker is perfect, and trades occasionally get mis-labeled short or long, TradeLog generates a "negative shares" error indicating that one or more trade records need to be edited for short or long status. This procedure usually happens occasionally and is easily fixed by a simple manual edit of the offending record. |
| Convert short / long with one transaction | Most online brokerage accounts do not allow you to close a short position and go long (or vice versa) with one transaction. This is the default in TradeLog. However, there are some brokerage execution platforms that do allow this. TradeLog has an option which breaks the single trade transaction into two so that the open position is closed and a new position is opened with absolutely no user intervention. Example: You are currently short 500 shares of MSFT and you put in an order to buy 1000 shares. You get a fill of all 1000 shares in one buy transaction. With this option turned on, TradeLog will close the open short position with a buy of 500 shares, and then open a new long position of 500 shares. |
| Aggregating trades by trade number | Active traders are in and out of stocks on a daily basis and get hit with many partial fills. Properly matching these for trade analysis becomes quite cumbersome. TradeLog uses a unique trade numbering system that assists active traders in grouping such partial fills into a single trade number (TrNum). This grouping, or aggregation of trade records, greatly simplifies the reporting of these for trade analysis. See our "How it Works" page for details on how TradeLog uses trade numbers. |
| FIFO trade matching for IRS Gains & Losses | Aggregating trades into trade number groups may or may not meet the letter of the IRS law for reporting trades. Therefore, our Gains & Losses report, which is used for filing your taxes, uses strict FIFO trade matching as required by the IRS. |
| Lists trades on G&L report by minimum number of shares | TradeLog reports each trade on the Gains & Losses report by the minimum number of shares. What this means is that if you buy 1000 shares of a stock and then sell 200 shares and then later on sell the balance of 800 shares, TradeLog properly reports this as two line items, one for a buy or sell of 200 shares, and another for 800 shares. The same holds true if you buy 200 shares, then buy 800 more shares, and then sell the whole lot with one sale of 1000 shares. TradeLog creates two line items in the Gains & Losses report. |
| Tax Lot Matching | The above two items bring up an interesting dilemma: What if you have specifically determined that the above mentioned trades were of the same tax lot? No problem! Our Edit, Match Tax Lots function makes short work of identifying those records as one specific tax lot. |
| Support for Stocks, Options, Futures, Single-Stock-Futures, and Currencies | TradeLog is the only software product than properly handles all of the various instrument types that today's active trader may trade. Our reports allow you to report on any of these different instruments separate from the others, and also reports these properly for tax filing purposes, rather than simply intermingling these together which creates a nightmare come tax time. |
Wash Sales: |
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| Feature: | Benefit: |
| Properly calculates wash sales | The dreaded IRS wash sale rule is an absolute nightmare for active traders!
When trading the same stocks over and over again, buying and selling unequal share amounts, making small gains and losses,
hundreds or thousands of wash sales are inevitably generated, and this rule becomes unbelievably cumbersome.
TradeLog makes short work of this nightmare by properly calculating and reporting each and every wash sale that occurs throughout the tax year whether this impacts your year end bottom line or not as required by the IRS. |
| Properly handles wash sales on short sales | The IRS wash sale rule is a bit different when it comes to short sales.
If you buy back your short sale shares at a loss and then short the same stock again within the 30 day period,
you have a wash sale and the loss becomes part of your future cost basis when you finally cover the short.
This is a bit different in the sense that a sale has triggered the wash sale rather than a purchase.
Also, if you are short a stock and you buy it back at a loss, and then buy the same stock within the 30 day period, this also triggers a wash sale. Because TradeLog accurately handles short sale positions as well as long positions, we are able to properly handle this particular part of the wash sale rule. |
| Properly handles wash sales between stocks and options | The IRS uses the phrase "substantially identical securities" when it discusses what triggers a wash sale. What this means for the stock and options trader is that if you take a loss on a stock or an option, and then buy back that same stock, or an option on that same stock, whether the option is the same month and strike price or not, you have a wash sale situation. There is no clarification in the tax law as to how far "in or out of the money" the option is, or what month and year the option expires. So TradeLog simply applies this rule as follows: If the underlying stock is the same, then the option is "substantially" the same. |
Properly calculates wash sales on an unequal number of shares |
It is inevitable that an active trader will occasionally (and possibly almost never) buy
back an equal number of shares after realizing a loss. When you buy back more or less shares than what you sold
at a loss, according to the IRS the loss gets split up by the lesser of number of shares bought back or the number of
shares sold at a loss. If this sounds complicated, imagine having many thousands of trades all in unequal share
amounts. It gets like the branches on a tree!
This is where most wash sale / schedule d calculators start to fall apart. As long as you buy back an equal number of shares, everything is OK. As soon as you don't, their software falls to pieces. TradeLog™ handles this in seconds and it does not matter how many shares you buy back and in how many different buys you do so. It doesn't matter how many branches are on the tree! |
| Properly defers wash sales to next year | According to the IRS tax law, if you sell a stock (or option) at a loss, and then buy
it back with a +/- 30 day window, that loss must be moved into the cost basis of the purchase that you made. Most
wash sales have absolutely no affect on your year end profit or loss except the following two conditions:
In either case the loss is disallowed for the current tax year and needs to be deferred to a future tax year. TradeLog handles any wash sale losses that need to be deferred and moves them forward to next year so that you never lose the loss and are able to claim it when you finally dispose of the stock or option. Please click here to see a sample Gain & Loss report including wash sales. Notice the many wash sale transactions and adjustments throughout the year which have absolutely no affect on the bottom line. Next scroll down to the bottom of the report and notice the line item that lists "Total Wash Sales Deferred to Next Tax Year." This report can then be easily filed as an attachment to your IRS schedule d. |
| Properly changes holding period | When re-purchasing a stock or option within 30 days of a long-term loss, the short-term re-purchase trade holding period should include the holding period of the long term trade, thereby converting the short-term trade to long-term. TradeLog v 4.1 does this automatically. |
Filing your Taxes: |
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| Feature: | Benefit: |
| Automatically creates a schedule d-1 attachment | Please click here to see a sample Schedule D-1 report including wash sales ready to be attached to your schedule d. |
| Save Gains & Losses report in PDF format | This allows you to send or email your Gains and Losses report to your accountant or any other person involved with your taxes. |
| Save Gains & Losses report in Plain Text Tab- Delimited format | This allows you to send or email your Gains and Losses report to your accountant or any other person involved with your taxes who can then open it with Excel or any other spreadsheet or word processor software. |
| Save Gains & Losses report in TFX format | This allows you to import your Gains and Losses report into any tax software
program that accepts TXF files such as TurboTax™ and TaxCut™
Note: Some limitations may exist due to these programs not handling wash sales properly. See our FAQ for details |
| Automatically creates a next tax year data file | TradeLog™ is analogous to an accounting program where one needs to
"close the books" on the current tax year. This automated procedure performs the following functions:
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| Handles MTM accounting (GTT TradeLog™ only) |
GTT TradeLog™ for Mark To Market accounting performs the additional year end functions:
Please click here to see a sample section 481 report. |
Trade Accounting: |
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| Feature: | Benefit: |
| Drill down capability | Most personal finance software programs are quite inflexible when it comes to trade accounting reports. All of the following functions allow you to "slice and dice" your trade history data so that you can drill down to exactly the trade data you wish to view. Once the data has been "filtered" by any of these functions, you may run any report on that subset of data which provides an unlimited number of unique reports. No need for analyzing your data with a spreadsheet! |
| Find function | Powerful find function finds the most common types of trade transactions such as: tickers, trade numbers, short or long trades, stocks, options, single-stock-futures, futures and currency trades, and duplicate trades. |
| All, Open, Closed buttons | One click toolbar buttons enable you to find all of your open positions, all of your closed trades, or all your trade transactions. |
| Date Range button | One click date range button allows you to filter your trades by date range or by an entire tax year. |
| Sorting your trades | A simple click on the column header sorts the entire list by that column. For example, to sort your list by ticker, simply click on the ticker column header. |
| Grid filter | Enabling this function allows you to further filter your list by the col-Ls of any column. For example, you can find all transactions that have a commission value of $3.00 or a price of $11.00. |
| Custom grid filter | In addition to the grid filter, you can build a custom grid filter using basic boolean operators so that you
can find a complex set of filter criteria. You are limited only by your imagination. All custom filters may be saved for
future recall. Example: Find all close transactions for AOL and MSFT for the month of January where the prices were between $9.00 and $15.00. |
Reports: |
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| Feature: | Benefit: |
| Report on filtered grid |
All of the TradeLog™ reports report on whatever data is currently being displayed in the grid. So if you setup the filter in the example above, you could run the trade Detail report to print your results in a formatted report fashion. The same is true for the other reports including the Gains & Losses report. For example, you can use this report to examine one particular equity or report on your first quarter results only. |
| FAST report generation | Do not confuse our TradeLog software with some of the cheaper knockoffs which literally take hours to
run a report on a data file containing only a few thousand records.
TradeLog has been tested running the Gains & Losses report, with wash sale calculations, on a data file containing just over 75,000 records (trade transacrtions). The report was 2,200 pages long and completed in under 2 minutes, on a Pentium 2.66 GHz PC with 512MB RAM running Windows XP Pro. And there was still enough memory left over to run other Windows applications while the report was running! This certainly was not the average trader, as most data files containing a few thousand transactions take only a few seconds to run. |
| Detail report | This is the most basic report which lists each and every trade transaction with sub-totals for each trade number grouping. |
| Summary report | This is a summary of a complete trade number grouping, listing the total shares bought and sold, as well as total sales price and cost amounts, and the total profit or loss realized on each trade. |
| Schedule D-1 Continuation Sheet report | This is the report that gets filed with your taxes. |
| Gains & Losses report | This The report uses the same columns as the IRS Schedule D-1 Continuation Sheet but with twice as many lines per page resulting in half the number of pages and has been successfully filed by our users for the last 6 years. |
| Performance report | This is a comprehensive trade performance report which lists over ten different performance metrics such as: Sales/Purchases, Total Profit/Loss, Total Winning Profit/Loss, Commissions, Average Profit/Loss per share, Total Losing Profit/Loss, Shares Closed, Average Profit/Loss per trade, Total Winning Shares, Largest Profit/Loss, and Total Losing Shares |
| Chart report | Allows you to chart your daily, weekly, or monthly profit or loss on a simple bar chart. In addition, any trade metric found on the Performance report can be charted on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. An equity curve chart is also included so you can see your equity either rising or falling over a set time period . |
| PDF export reports | Adobe PDF is the defacto standard for emailing or sending reports over the Internet |
| Tab-delimited text export | A universal tab-delimited plain text file format allows you to copy and paste your report into any Windows software program such as MS Excel, Word, or any other spreadsheet or word processing program. The bottom line with this option is: if you need to create your own custom report or report format that you cannot accomplish in TradeLog, then use your favorite Windows program to do so. We have made it as easy as copy and paste! |
| TXF File Export | Export your TradeLog Gains & Losses to a TXF file and then import into many popular tax software programs that accept TXF file
imports such as TurboTax™ and Tax Cut™ to name a few. Note: Some limitations may exist - See our FAQ for details |
Portfolio Management: |
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| Feature: | Benefit: |
| Open positions window | One click on the Open button displays all of your open positions (as of yesterday) complete with the average cost of each open position enabling you to make proper trade decisions on when and at what price to close all or part of your position. This can be extremely valuable when you have added to your position over many days or months. |
| Price all open positions | TradeLog gets the current (20 minute delayed) prices for all of your open positions including stocks, options, and futures. If a price cannot be found for any open positions, TradeLog prompts you to manually enter the current price. Never again do you need to get out your calculator or spreadsheet to get this valuable information. |
| Expire options | The open positions window also has an Expire Options button so that any options shown as open that may have expired can be closed out with one click. See the Importing category above. |
Product support: |
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| Feature: | Benefit: |
| Online support | Support is just one click away from within the TradeLog software. Just click Help, Online Support to go direct to our extensive online Support Center. Or go to our main web page and click the Support link at the top of the page. |
| Free support and updates for one year | All TradeLog™ software subscriptions come with:
Please see our Product Update & Support Policy for details. |
| Live tech support from a Toll Free number | TradeLog is the ONLY trade accounting and tax software program that includes live technical support
for a period of one year after the date of purchase. Imagine running into a problem when trying to get your taxes done and your only
recourse is email. We think that that is unacceptable when it comes to tax accounting software and therefore pride ourselves in our
exceptional support. |
| Fast email response | Email support is also available for a period of one year after date of purchase by submitting an Online Support Request form. Online technical support requests are typically answered in an hour or less (many times in just a few minutes if during normal support hours Mon-Fri, 9AM-5PM EST). |
| Timely software updates | Armen Computing Ltd. is by no means a giant in the software business. Therefore our responsiveness to software bugs, changes to online brokers trade history reports, and other user suggested product enhancements, etc. has been nothing short of remarkable. Generally when bugs are identified, or software changes become necessary, they are implemented in a matter of days rather then years like most other software companies. For example we identified a major flaw in one of the popular tax software programs when it comes to properly handling wash sales and we were told that it would not be addressed until next tax year! Please see our update history to see how quickly we have responded to broker trade history report changes, customer requests, and software bugs. The big boys are just not that nimble. |
| Automated web updates | Each time you run TradeLog on your PC it automatically checks to see if any new updates are available (if you are connected
to the Internet). If there are new updates, then the status bar at the bottom of the program turns yellow, alerting you to the fact
that a new update is available. With one click on the status bar you are taken to our Update / Download
page where you can decide whether to download the setup program for the latest update or not. It only takes a matter of minutes to keep your TradeLog software up to date. |
| Discounted subscription renewals | 20% discount for annual subscription renewals. No one seems to offer this one! |