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Non-Tech : Datek Brokerage $9.95 a trade -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alf who wrote (8371)	5/2/1998 8:56:00 AM
From: steve kennedy	Respond to of 16892

Tim, I can't help you with excel but I wrote a bare bones DOS utility that will convert Datek trades into a Quicken Importable File -- I run it for about 5 secs every month, then import the trades into Quicken -- It literally saves many, many hours of data entry & frustration. I wrote it out of desperation because I hadn't processed any trades for 1997 -- it took a few hours to write, but enabled me to enter & reconcile over 2500 trades in under an hour, while a month that I had to do manually took all weekend. I beefed it up with some legal disclaimers, added some instructions and released it as freeware -- If you or anybody else wants a copy email me at zipwork@aol.com and I'll send it to you. I have had a lot of positive feedback from active traders that use it. Steve zipwork@aol.com

To: Alf who wrote (8371)	5/2/1998 9:42:00 AM
From: steve kennedy	Respond to of 16892

A Quicken Bug I found Datek will effortlessy let you go from a long postition to a short position in 1 trade, For example: buy 500 shares, sell 1000, then buy 500 to cover. Problem 1: Quicken will not let you record this in 3 transactions. Solution: You have to enter: buy 500 shares, sell 500, sell 500 short, buy 500 to cover Problem 2: Quicken will appear to import the data parsed from my utility Datek-Q, just fine. It will even calculate the correct balance, BUT if you run a CAP gains report you'll see that Quicken didn't match up and calculate the profit/loss properly. In my case it took a small profit and reported it as an aprox $3,000 dollar loss Solution: Delete the trades in question and manually reenter them as separate transactions as described in problem 1. I rarely go from long to short in 1 transaction, and this first time I did was accidental -- I had tried to sell 1000 shares, got a partial fill of 500, canceled the order, then placed an order to sell 1000 shares again at another price, that left me with 500 short...duh, but I was lucky and made a small profit on it. I have no intention of trying to find a work-around because this is a BUG in Quicken,involves a trading feature of Datek that I do not plan to intentionally use at this time, and fixing it would involve changing & adding trading data. You'll have to do it manually. If you trade this way and use my utility BEWARE that your Quicken balance will be correct but your CAP GAINS report way off Steve