Advanced Portfolio Report

[Frank H. Ellenberger]

Hi,

first I wish to thank you, Mike, for your work on this report.

Am 28.01.2014 03:13, schrieb Mike Alexander:
> --On January 28, 2014 12:33:09 AM +0000 Richard Ullger
> <rullger at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>>
>> In previous versions of the report, brokerage was not taken into
>> account in the Realised Gain column. The 'Ignore brokerage fees when
>> calculating returns' setting determines whether the brokerage column
>> is displayed and the figure taken into account in the Total Return
>> column.
> 
> Let's see if I understand this correctly.  You would like brokerage fees
> to be always excluded from realized gains, but included in total return
> if the ignore option is not selected, is that right?  I wasn't aware
> that I had changed this, but perhaps I did accidentally.
> 
> The ignore option removes them from both realized gains and (hence) from
> total return.  I think changing it the way you suggest would annoy US
> users since US tax law says that brokerage fees are added to your basis
> when calculating gain.  I guess I could add a new option to control
> this, but the report is complicated already.

Tax laws are different. Here in DE, and probably other parts of the EU,
broker fees are an expense and valid in the year they occur.

Lets say I bought in December for 100 + 1% fees and sell now for 110 I
will have in my tax declaration:
2013:  -1
2014: +10

This 10,00 profit will split in:
 2,50 capital gain source tax
 0,13 "Solidarity" extra charge (German reunification tax, sic!)
 0,22 church tax
 7,15 bank account
If I put this split in the sell transaction, the taxes are handled by
the report as fees. My workaround is to transfer the capital gain into
an interim account and split it from there to the target accounts. So I
can also allow for different dates between the deposit and the bank
account. But this could be simplified, if we had an action "tax", which
would be handled different from fees.

But back the report. Despite the tax handling is different, I see my
gross capital gain as 10,00/101,00 = ~9,9%

Eventually more interesting than the absolute rate of gain would be the
average rate per annum. But in some cases this might be pretty complex
to calculate.

Cheers
Frank