Tracking capital gains on shares

[presidenttttt]

Some enterprising individual should run courses on this, I know this stuff reasonably well, but it can get overwhelming, I would pay for it.
Maybe an AAM thread on its own is needed that provides instructions on how to calculate all this, one for each broker.

I think knowing it is one thing, but actually doing the admin is another if one is relatively active in buying and or exiting, across multiple app

 

[Homewardbound11]

We had a revenue query of foreign income from dividends . Straight forward as dividends are pretty much on each brokerage account annual statement. Went fine .

Gains from sales I find is more difficult as with online brokers their annual gains and losses rarely add up.
So you do need the simple excel sheet .
Purchase price times no of shares . Minus the execution costs and revenues exchange rate on the day .
If there are any splits or restructuring of shares ( ie Chinese stock) note them and the details .
If not then it’s down to selling price times no of shares minus the fees and ex rate on the day or from revenue site .
As mentioned FIFO so selling in blocks make it a little easier for gains calculations

 

[qwerty5]

So you do need the simple excel sheet .

Was just coming to this site to ask about something like this. I sell Options. There can be 30 or 40 trades in a month as I sell puts or calls and sometimes buy them back if the profit is sufficient. I have a spreadsheet where I export the trades from my broker to CSV. Then I download and merge in the historical currency rates from ECB into the sheet.
Then I've formulas that will give me the profit / loss in Euro based on what criteria I specify. E.g. I've a report sheet that will add up the profits / loss for Jan - Nov for each year and another column for Dec.

Is this kind of spreadsheet sufficient as evidence if Revenue ever audit me? Or what else can they ask for? The broker only gives a yearly 1042-S form which just shows dividends. Like you say, that's fine for dividends (in a dollar amount but my sheet calculates the Euro value of each transaction on that sheet too) but no use for share sales (or options profits).

 

[Protocol]

There can be 30 or 40 trades in a month

That sounds like a trade to me, according to the Badges of Trade test, although IANAL.