Overview of The Day Trader
The Day Trader is a comprehensive stock account management program designed to help investors keep track of stock transactions. It was designed to make filing tax returns a breeze. The program organizes your portfolios into various accounts and keeps track of buy and sell transactions. When a buy and a sell occur with the same stock a summary action is generated. In addition, tax files are generated, sorted by the year to facilitate filing tax returns. The program can run in the background allowing transactions to be entered from a small toolbar while other programs are active.
Getting Started
When the program is first opened a default account is available. This account and others that may be added later can be personalized by changing its name. Default commissions and fees can be added so that as trades are made fixed information does not have to be entered each time. A general description of the account along with any other pertinent information can be stored in a text file associated with the account. The program has extensive backup and restore functions as well as the capability to open a new account and copy and existing account's files over into it.
Matching Buys with Sells
When loading transactions it is important that the actions be entered in the order they occur so that buys and sells can be matched properly. Thus a short sell should have the sell entered first then the buy and vice versa. If you buy the same stock at different times, the sell transaction will be matched with the earliest buy. For example, you buy 100 shares of HD on 6/1/99. You will show a buy action on that date and your portfolio will reflect 100 shares of HD. On 6/15/99 you buy another 100 shares. Your action now shows the two buys, the portfolio shows the two separate transactions, and the position shows 200 shares of HD with the average buy price, average commission and fees, and the total cost basis. Now on 6/20/99, you sell 50 shares of HD. The sell will be matched to the buy of 6/1/99. The action now shows the three transactions, the portfolio now shows 50 shares left in the 6/1/99 buy and the full 100 shares left in the 6/15/99 buy. The position shows 150 shares at the averaged price. Now the summary will show the 50 share buy-sell with expenses and profit and the tax view will have the same data appended to any other transactions in that account for that year. Had you sold 150 shares, you would have consumed all of the 100 shares from the first buy and the portfolio would show only the 50 shares left in the second buy. The summary and tax listings would show two transactions, 100 from the first and 50 from the second. In this way long and short tax positions can be easily sorted out.
Stock Listings
The activity and status of each account is available for display as a Portfolio, Position, Action, Summary, and Tax Year Listings. Buying and selling causes entries to be placed in each of these lists. The Portfolio List displays buys that have not been matched with sells or short sells not yet covered by buys. Occasionally there will be a residual entry, for example, a buy of 100 shares and a sell of 60 shares would leave a residual in the portfolio of 40 shares. A buy of 100 shares and a later buy of 50 shares of the same stock would appear as two entries.
The Position Listing is directly related to the Portfolio. Basically, like stocks are summed together so the total holdings of a given stock are displayed on one line, except that long and short positions are summed separately.
The Action Listing shows each buy and sell transaction listed in order. There are no consolidations or cancellations as buys and sells are matched.
The Summary List shows the matched result of buys and sells. This list runs in the order of occurrence. The Tax List contains the appropriate data from the Summary List organized by the Year so that a printing of this list would contain all the information needed at tax time.
The Toolbar
The toolbar function can be selected from the main menu and is used to run the program in background while another program such as you web browser is running. You can use the toolbar to enter buy and sell transactions which will be processed identically to the process used when the program is active.
Getting More Information
Download the Help File. This will give a detailed overview of the program or download a 100 day fully functional trial version of the program. If you like what you see, you may license that version for your permanent use.