Tuesday Mid Day Thoughts 2/26/2008

I hate Taxes and Teenagers.
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I have always done my own taxes. The last couple of years I have used Turbo Tax. I think it is a good and simply product to use. Last year I bought a very simple product to slice and dice my broker statements to produce my Sched D. Last year it worked great. I had about 700 lines of transactions meaning if I bought and sold in pieces of 1000 shares or AKS it might be broken down into pieces of 100 or 200 shares. The software would put it back together as one transaction so the result was 175 trades. This whole process took me about 2 hours.
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This year I had 2200 transactions. The software would not work. I called them and they said they stopped supporting the product. I played with it and played. After my fourth attempt and about 20 hours, I finally got it to work. Only problem it gave me a bunch of errors from the way IB does Currency transactions. Once I got a mock Sched D, I compared it to the one that you can get from IB. Over a million dollars in total transaction differences between the two reports. I wanted to cry. A couple of days later, I find a note on IBs website that they needed to reprocess their Sched Ds. The difference is now one penny.
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Now I produce the file to go into Turbo Tax. I was expecting the 2200 transactions to melt down to 300 or 400 - instead 775. Turbo Tax was not happy. I had to go through something like 60 transaction to make sure they were not dups. Also the stock I transferred into my IB account was all screwed up. After many more hours of work and having to add in the Currency transaction by hand it was finally done. I had never gone through such Tax Hell before.
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Now teenagers - last year I told you guys how a 13 year old nearly killing me in two matches. I won the first match 2 games to 1 but lost the second 1 game to 2. Last night a 15 year old, did not only beat me but only took two games to do 15-11 and 15-5. He was not even tired. It sucks getting old.