Gathering Trade History from your online broker

Did I say this was easy?  There are many challenges to face here as well, for example...

Not all brokers report trade history the same way or in the same format. 
As a matter of fact there is NO standard of reporting from one brokerage to another when it comes to reporting trade history.  Here are some examples:

  • Ticker Symbols - Most brokers use ticker symbols to report stock transactions. Others use stock descriptions. And when they do, these descriptions can vary quite a bit from one broker to the next.  Even simple things such as reporting buys and sells and short sales are not the same across brokerages. 
  • Buy/Sell codes - Some use the terms buy or sell, bought or sold, purchase or sale, sell short, sold short, and the list goes on and on. Some simply report the shares sold as negative and the shares bought as positive.
  • Short Sales - Some flag when a stock is sold short, and when a buy covers the short.  Many do not, simply listing the trade as a buy or sell.  Some report the short sale but provide absolutely no indication that a buy is to cover the short or to go long. 
  • Trade Date - Most brokers use trade dates in their reports, a few use settlement dates only. 
  • Time of Day - Some include time of day, many do not.  To further complicate matters, a few brokers who do not provide a time of day stamp, occasionally report trades out of order for trades made on the same day. So a buy to cover can end up being reported BEFORE the short sale that it closes. Huh?
  • Share Price - Some brokers round share price to the nearest penny, while others show the full decimal price actually paid (ie: $0.0275 per share becomes $0.03 which overstates the amount)
  • Commissions and SEC Fees - Most brokers report the commissions and SEC fees per trade, with a few reporting these in separate columns.  Others simply report a total amount that includes commissions and fees. Still others leave off this critical and necessary information. This information is important because commissions and SEC fees should either get added to the cost basis, or subtracted from the sales amount for all completed trades reported on schedule d.

Option trading

It is even worse when it comes to reporting option trades.  Many brokers report options using option ticker symbols, which are reusable from one year to the next, or which mean something totally different from one year to the next.

  • Option Ticker Symbols use alphabetic characters to describe the expiration month and whether it is a put or a call but this provides no indication of the expiration year. 
  • Alphabetic characters are also used for the strike price but the same character can represent several different strike prices (ie: A = $5, $105, $205, or $305).
  • The first 2 to 4 characters of the option ticker symbol represent the underlying security, but in many cases these do not match the stock ticker symbol.
    (ie: DELL options = DLQ, DLY, DLK, etc.)
  • Some brokers provide this necessary information such as the proper expiration month and year, the correct strike price, and the underlying stock ticker, while others provide only part of the information or use a partial stock description.

Since the IRS requires that wash sales be calculated between stocks and options, which according to the IRS are "substantially identical", it is essential that there be some way of identifying that an option is related to a specific stock. What is required is a standard notation such as "DELL DEC06 40 CALL" which provides everything you need for tax purposes.

So, here is the $1 million question: How can anyone gather and make sense out of the broker provided trade history information so they can match up their trades and report them one line at a time on their schedule d? 

Once again this is why your accountant gets the big bucks!

Here is the second major benefit of using our TradeLog™ software:

TradeLog imports from your trade history direct from your online broker provided trade history report and reformats all of the data in a consistent format across all brokerages.

In addition, any broker specific anomalies such as described above are handled simply and easily by our custom import filters. - We do the heavy lifting for you!

This is not a simple "one size its all" approach to importing trade data. We take the data as presented by your broker, and do whatever is necessary in our software to straighten out that data so it is consistent, and so that it can easily be imported and matched.