How do I report just the short sales for the past year?

[lucabol]

Hi,
I have a portfolio of both long and short positions. I want to report the performance of each section separately.

FM doesn't have such a capability, but I thought I can create 2 different sub-portfolio and manually move all the investments that I shorted in one of them and the long investments in the other.

This is easy to do for the positions that I currently have, but I need to do it for all the stocks that I acquired and sold during the years. I can see all of them by chosing "View hidden investments", but I haven't figured out a way to distinguish the short ones from the long ones.

I played around with columns and reports to see if there is a particular value that would allow me to distinguish between the short (investments for which the first action is a distribution) and long (the first action is a purchase).

Please let me know if you have an idea of how to do it.

Thanks,
.luca

[Mark]

Hi luca,

One idea is to create a custom report with "Latest Purchase Date" and "Latest Redemption Date". Since you are looking for long/short closed positions any investment that has a 'last purchase date' later than 'last redemption date' you know will have been a short position, as you recorded a purchase to close the position.

[lucabol]

Thanks Mark, this is a smart trick. It worked.

In any case, shorts should really be separately identified in the metadata so that you can more easily report on them, ROI on them and such. You know that this is a topic dear to my heart

.luca