I guess I should have specified - in our case, they were
all long put/call positions. I would agree with the covered-call issues
that everyone's mentioned.
From: club_cafe-owner@bivio.com
[mailto:club_cafe-owner@bivio.com] On Behalf Of Rip
West
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2005 10:11 PM
To: The
Club Cafe
Subject: Re: club_cafe: entering Options
Manually
Rob said....
<<Manually accounting for calls is quite tricky
from a tax perspective.>>
That's very true. In the case of writing covered
calls there are three possible outcomes. It is not impossible to account for
these outcomes by workarounds, but it gets very tricky, especially in getting
the dates correct. In addition to that there is a problem that I have never
been able to work around. That is how to value the covered call from the time
that you write it until it has expired or been exercised. Since it is, in
effect, a short sale, you have to have a way to input a negative position in
your valuation statement, and have that value fluctuate with the market price
of the call.
As Rob said, bivio offers a premium service to take care
of those problems. I would never try to account for covered calls manually
using the basic program.
Rip West
Saint Paul, MN