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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AurumRabosa who wrote (68110)	9/23/1999 3:24:00 PM
From: Kaye Thomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

I'll be doing some more writing on the trader issue in the near future and will post at least some of it to the web site. Part of the difficulty is that although there is a fair amount of case law, none of it is really close to the situation of today's electronic day traders. Until recently, although it was theoretically possible for anyone to be a trader, as a practical matter it was almost impossible to be a trader without being a member of an exchange. The commissions would kill you before you got around to filing your tax return. Now it's a matter of interpreting the law as developed in cases decided before the advent of deep discount electronic trading, and the gray area here is very large indeed. As for a vehicle that permits deferral of income or gain until profits are withdrawn, you're pretty much limited to IRAs and qualified retirement plans. With enough money, and enough people involved, it may be possible to achieve this result by forming an offshore entity, but the tax laws make this difficult so we're talking very serious dollars and multiple participants. Kaye Thomas, author Fairmark Press Tax Guide for Investors fairmark.com