Interactive Brokers

bellenuit said:

I do all my accounts on my own spreadsheets and gave them to an accountant when I used one a few years back. I now do my accounts for my company and my personal tax myself. I print and store online the annual statements from IB and keep them as proof of my trading for the year, should I ever be audited. I find it easy to maintain the spreadsheet so long as I do it at the end of each day I trade. That way I can see my accounts are correct by comparing with the relevant IB balance.

I agree, it would be pretty hard for an accountant to make sense of their reports if he/she was not used to them. The transactions they create for stock offers, share buybacks etc are almost incomprehensible.

You can get a report on franking credits but not until after the end of the tax year. It is available under the tax reports section about mid-July. I usually find a couple of errors in it though.

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I have tried to get the report for FY ended 6/18 - the credits are not there

It just has columns as follows
Div amount
% franked
Amount recd.
Unfranked amount
No tax credit column


GOOD To do your own accounts / so do you just use realised or mark to market profit/loss please?

And do you bother with NAV start and finish values - taking out any deposits or withdrawals of course

freebird54 said:

I have tried to get the report for FY ended 6/18 - the credits are not there

It just has columns as follows
Div amount
% franked
Amount recd.
Unfranked amount
No tax credit column


GOOD To do your own accounts / so do you just use realised or mark to market profit/loss please?

And do you bother with NAV start and finish values - taking out any deposits or withdrawals of course

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It gets worse - now amongst all the other problems it says no tax forms for closed accounts - they were the ones that closed them and moved them to oz inserting an extra digit in the account name

Still unable to login to a/c management on an iPhone

This is the first line of the detail section of my report for last year:



Like you I have tried the reports for this year (Company account which was migrated in December I think) and it lists nothing. But it does give the message (when I select Dividend Report): "Please note there are tax forms available for closed account(s) Uxxxxxx", but does not indicate how to access them. However, that dividend report seems to be US orientated because when I select it under my personal account which has been transferred to IB Australia for a few years, it lists dividends paid by Calendar Year not by Fiscal Year and has US dollar equivalents for the Australian Dividends and doesn't show Franking Credits (probably meant for a US citizen holding Australian shares). That would explain why nothing appears under my company account's dividend report, as all dividends received in calendar 2018 were under the old account number. I suspect dividends received after the conversion under the new account number will appear in a separate report (not that one) after our tax year end as per usual. Hopefully that will combine both account numbers so that nothing is missing.

I also tried using Classic AM, but the "Reports" option was not available there for some reason, so I am at a loss as to how you can get last years franking credits. You can obviously work them out yourself if there isn't that many as they are reported on the ASX and some other websites (on a per share basis).

freebird54 said:

GOOD To do your own accounts / so do you just use realised or mark to market profit/loss please?

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It's a bit difficult to explain, but for my company account I value my closing stock on the lower of cost or market on a per batch basis. That keeps my profit (and hence tax) for the current year at a minimum (but defers the difference to future years).

freebird54 said:

And do you bother with NAV start and finish values - taking out any deposits or withdrawals of course

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I ignore the NAV values that IB report and use my own figures valuing each batch of stock on the lower of Cost or Market (with last year's closing value equal to this year's opening value). I use the ATO formula for profit: Profit = Sales - (Opening Stock + Purchases - Closing Stock) and as I mentioned, this year's opening stock will (must) always equal last year's closing stock. This year's closing stock is valued as mentioned above on the lower of Cost or Market on a per batch basis (ie. the batch of shares that constituted one purchase transaction, such as 100 X NAB @ $25)

Bellenuit

Thank you so much for your feedback - seeing my accountant tomorrow.

Do you all use Mark to Market or realised figures for profit/loss on shares and options?

Hi.

Due to my personal circumstances I use realised figures.

YES I have tax losses and unclaimed imputed tax credits - for shares and options and just give accountant that and divs/brokerage - for both personal and pty/ltd a/c
Keeping compant for part pension etc.

freebird54 said:

YES I have tax losses and unclaimed imputed tax credits - for shares and options and just give accountant that and divs/brokerage - for both personal and pty/ltd a/c
Keeping company for part pension etc.

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accountant agrees it is very complicated - I just picked out realised profits for him.

Anyone use the portfolio analysis report - again too comprehensive but it is interesting to compare your performance with others and there are some great tools

Anyone done share buy backs with them recently - they have stuffed me on every one - that is not getting the full allocation compared to local brokers

freebird54 said:

Anyone done share buy backs with them recently - they have stuffed me on every one - that is not getting the full allocation compared to local brokers

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I haven't done buybacks (to my recollection) but I have partaken in rights issues. These have always been OK, but the transaction stream they generate to do it have been pretty much incomprehensible. They do sell any fractional portion that may be acquired. For example, if your entitlement gives you 95.25 shares, you will be allocated the 95, with the 0.25 sold on your behalf at the issue price.

bellenuit said:

I haven't done buybacks (to my recollection) but I have partaken in rights issues. These have always been OK, but the transaction stream they generate to do it have been pretty much incomprehensible. They do sell any fractional portion that may be acquired. For example, if your entitlement gives you 95.25 shares, you will be allocated the 95, with the 0.25 sold on your behalf at the issue price.

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that makes sense to me ..... (but agree it looks way complicated)
the chess holder (whoever that is here) gets only 1 chance at a allocation round-up (if available in the prospectus), so cannot offer the same opportunity to beneficials. Problem is they cannot round down for each beneficial as that opens a can of worms ... so path of least resistance is to do actual allocation value and refund the fraction.

Do they then round up the currency refund fraction in ur account?

The return on buybacks is great - TLS RIO WOW CTX BHP ETC 7-17% franking credits of course.
this loss is why I am not happy with IB

https://www.afr.com/markets/ubs-macquarie-predict-more-buybacks-in-2019-20181214-h1946g

HelloU said:

Do they then round up the currency refund fraction in ur account?

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Well they always round everything to the nearest cent ($0.005 and above rounded up, <$0.005 down), so we are only talking of a fraction of a cent after they sell your fractional holding. If in USD, then obviously the sales amount will be rounded to the nearest 0.01 USD and then if converted to AUD (which will be a separate transition) to the nearest 0.01 AUD depending on the rate they get.

Actually that is what they show in their reports. But in actuality, I believe they hold your balances to more than 2 decimal places (I am not sure how many) but display/report them to the nearest cent when rounded.This can be quite frustrating as it is not uncommon to see in the Cash section something like: Opening Balance $10,000.00, Purchases $2.000.23 Commission $10.77 Closing Balance $7,989.01 when you would expect $7,989.00. This is because even though they are displaying the first three values rounded to the nearest cent, they are holding the values at a higher accuracy. So when they sum the held values and round the answer, there can be a discrepancy of one cent either way compared to summing the rounded values as displayed. Since in my spreadsheet I always round to the nearest cent like IB, but unlike IB I store in the cell the value as rounded, I occasionally get this mismatch between my balances and that of IB. I then create an adjusting value of + or - 0.01 to bring my figures in line with IB. Hope the above made sense.

Actually, from memory they round to the nearest cent as described above, but it may be always rounded up or always rounded down (when displayed/reported). I don't have time to check now. But no matter how they round, you will get that occasional 0.01 discrepancy due to the fact that they hold the values to a higher accuracy.

Anyone here involved in the BBY liquidation with the interactive brokers platform?
I have some bad news

freebird54 said:

Anyone here involved in the BBY liquidation with the interactive brokers platform?
I have some bad news

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When you try to claim they offer you a figure which does not include any stock, dividends or interest and as usual IB refuse to discuss

You can now claim but with 62m in claims 42m in assets and 4 years of fees to go in I dont feel there will be much left.I wonder who stole all the money? and will they go to jail?

Does anyone know what the difference between trading vs investment accounts in interactive brokers.

Also my current account is not allowed to short stocks. Can someone tell me I can activate this? (I was testing shorting US stock on demo account and couldn't. Then i tried on real account and couldn't either. )

Cheers
J

I got an email from IB saying I have to migrate my account to a new entity IB Australia. Anyone had or see any issues doing this for an SMSF account?

thanks

village idiot said:

I got an email from IB saying I have to migrate my account to a new entity IB Australia. Anyone had or see any issues doing this for an SMSF account?

thanks

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Your protection in case of IB collapse is far less under IB Australia. GST will be applied to some fees where it wasn't before. Otherwise pretty much as you are used to. You will probably get a new account number (they usually add 7 to the existing one, so for year end or year -to-date reports you will have to take the consolidation option to get both accounts treated as one). There may be a lot of weird transactions, that you can probably ignore, that involve transfers between the old and the new account. In the consolidated reports these should cancel out.

Australian non-business IB account here. Does anyone know if any forex leverage available? IB is most credible platform out there for me, so really avoiding going to specialised forex broker. I only want leverage of 2x or 3x, but I can't see a clear answer on their site. Everyone knows now no leverage for stocks in my scenario.

To make forex trading worthwhile with no leverage whatsoever you need significant capital.

I wonder if this will eventuate in Australia? Schwab also announced commission free trades in the US today. The IB article below also mentions free data.

TD Ameritrade and other brokerages’ shares tank after Interactive Brokers unveils service offering commission-free stock trades

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/26/int...ml?__source=sharebar|twitter&amp;par=sharebar