Trading Reports

[AssetHound]

I'm having a little problem creating a trading summary report -- something like a summary of trades and ROI by day or week. When you have multiple buys and sells for the same stock -- say 4+ per day -- the software seems to consider only the start and end prices. If the price declines, but you actually made money, you would expect to see a positive ROI or return. I get a negative return since price declined.

It seems the reports are more designed for long-term buy and hold and not necessarily for intraday trading results reporting. What am I missing?

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi AssetHound,

The ROI yields would be for an investment (or symbol, asset type, goal, sub-portfolio, etc) for a selected time period. You can't calculate ROI for just a single transaction. For example, if you look at the "Yield" column in the Portfolio Performance report, that is the yield from the report starting date through the report ending date. The ROI yield equation does including the starting and ending values (from the market price), plus it factors in all the transactions within the yield term. If you made money over a period, the ROI should be positive, even if the price declined over that same period. You can read all about the ROI yield equation, and see a sample equation here:

http://fundmanagersoftware.com/help/yields_roi.html

You can also turn on logging if you'd like to see the particulars of a certain yield calculation. This may help you see why you are getting the numbers you do get.

If you're trying to see information on a per-trade basis, you might look at the "Open Lots" and "Capital Gain" reports instead.

[AssetHound]

The Open Lots report comes close but it seems to only use the current price and not the price when sold. I can't seem to get any results for the Capital Gains report despite the fact that I have some positions that were opened and closed within the year. I tried running it with a number of different options but none seemed to work. The idea of capital gains based on FIFO is good, however.

It looks like the software won't do what I wanted to do. It would really be awesome if you guys would JV with the folks at TradeLog to add distributions to their mark-to-market trade reporting. We could get tax forms and trade reporting along with portfolio monitoring in one package. Just a thought . . .

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi AssetHound,

The "Open Lots" report only displays information on lots open as of the report date. If you're looking for information on lots you've already sold, these should show up in a Capital Gains report. Here are a few things to check:

- Make sure your report date spans the dates you sold the shares
- Make sure you are reporting on the sub-portfolio containing the shares you sold
- Check that your shares sold are not marked as cash or tax-free. See "Investment Properties...". As a quick check you can turn off the capital gain report filters under "Options / Report Preferences... / Capital Gains / Exclude Investments". If turning off those options causes your transactions to show up, then you have these investments set as cash or tax-free, and you can change this under "Investment Properties...".