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

To: Gorak Shep who wrote (11554)	4/9/1999 8:15:00 PM
From: gbh	Respond to of 16892

Gorak, have you checked out this site yet? Supposedly free Level 2 quotes if you sign up by 4/15/99. tradescape.com

To: Gorak Shep who wrote (11554)	4/10/1999 2:40:00 AM
From: Jon Tara	Respond to of 16892

OK, my review of StockTax, at risk of being stoned to death. :) Not exactly a brilliant peice of software. REALLY sloppy GUI, funny non-standard window layout, confusing to use, etc. etc. But I bought it and it did the job for me. 1-2 days work compressed into a few minutes. Haven't completed the job, but looks like a snap. I produced a Quicken file, which I was able to import successfully into Quicken, and will then import into TurboTax. I'm not completely convinced that it will produce a Schedule D that will be acceptable to the IRS. I used it only because I have been completely unsuccessful doing a Quicken download from Datek, and presume that this will never work. Yes, the first thing I noticed was a lack of support for wash sales. But I intend to do just what I did last year - ignore em! (Double yikes!) What I mean is this: luckily, I didn't have any wash sales that actually mattered - none of them spanned across the beginning or end of the year. Losses in wash sales cannot be claimed on the trade on which they are incurred. However, they are added to the basis for the next trade in the same stock, and so there is no net difference - UNLESS a wash spans the end of the year or the end of a long-term holding period. In the case of end of year, it has the effect of defering the recognition of the loss into the next year. If audited, I suppose I'd go through the pain-in-the-butt effort of identifying the washs and adjusting the basis of each trade. But the net effect on taxes would be zero. I don't recommend this - just pointing-out what I did. TurboTax does handle washes, kinda. You have to drop down a box identifying a sale as a wash, but you have to do the basis adjustment manually, by changing the purchase price of the subsequent trade. And it gets REAL messy when dealing with unequal trade quantities. Then you have to sometimes go back and split buys into multiple transactions. Ugh! BTW, as an author of some RealTick III compatable software, I was interested to see that he also had some RT3 software as well. It does basic charting, and I'm afraid I fail to see what it does that RT3 doens't do itself. But I suppose I should look more closely. And, hey, I've gotta give credit to anybody who can figure out how to request and process incoming RT3 data. Townsend has a toolkit, but boy is it sketchy! It's very much a learn-by-doing-and-experimenting experience. I'm still learning all the tricks. Don't mean to turn this back into a Madhur debate. But I felt that since I'd defended him, I ought to now post my misgivings. What can I say - it did the job - not pretty, but did the job, and was worth the money to me. Sometimes we do things we'd rather not as a means to an end. :)