Wish I could abolish cap gain taxes forever for you, folks, but until that day here’s another kind of tax relief. We’ve just introduced some excellent new tax management tools from Scivantage MaxitTM that should make tax season a whole lot less frazzled for you. Check it out at Accounts > Maxit Tax Manager.

This is tax management that helps you clean up past trading activities and their tax implications, make tax prep in the present go more smoothly, plus helps you manage your future decisions with tax implications in mind.

Let’s start with past clean-up, since that’s what we’re all facing (and dreading) at this time of year. Here’s the tax-management firepower you’ll now have at your disposal to ease that effort. Here’s just a taste:

•    Support for stocks, mutual funds, index and stock options, ETFs, and bonds. In fact, with Maxit, TradeKing will be the first online brokerage to offer complete cost basis coverage for stock options, including automatic adjustments for assignments and exercises. 

•    Wash sale flagging, calculation and deferral

•    Serious tax-lot drill-down. You’ll see everything from disposals made out of the tax-lot, cost basis, adjustment due to corporate actions and wash sales – plus  adjusted cost basis linked to the tax-lot with transaction details and revision date

•    Calculate proper lot relief methods including FIFO, LIFO, Specific ID, MaxGain and Average Cost and MinTax, a tax efficient method available only with Maxit.

•    Automatic support for corporate actions, across all your TK accounts while maintaining your cost-basis integrity. Corporate actions supported include Split/Reverse Split; Rights/Warrants; Stock Dividend; Merger with or without cash; Spin off; Dividend/Dividend reinvested; Redemptions/call; Cash in lieu. In fact, here’s another industry first: with Maxit, TradeKing is the only online brokerage to automatically adjust your portfolio for complicated voluntary corporate actions.

With all that manual work re-creating the past out of the way, our tax management suite will help speed you through this year’s tax-prep and even includes alerts to help you make tax-minded choices as you trade your way through 2008. Here’s a roundup of some of the tool’s capabilities on that front:

•    Tax lot matching and short-term/long-term characterization

•    Real-time, actionable trade analysis of short- and long-term gain/loss opportunities.

•    Customized tax reports for realized and unrealized gains/losses and IRS Schedule D

Lots of additional goodies on the horizon for the 2008 tax year, too, like pre-trade alerts to help you avoid wash sales and identify lots for loss harvesting. Keep an eye out for other tax management tools, too, to help squeeze out precious improvements in after-tax performance. Our goal is to help you keep more money in your account by paying less to the IRS.

Whew! I’m dreading April less by the minute – hope you feel the same. ;-)

Seriously, let us know what you think of our new tax-manager tool. We want to make your tax season a breeze, and this is only just the first wave of our efforts to help you in this area. Let us know what we’re doing right or wrong here – and what you’d like to see next on this front.
 
[image: DEATH and TAXES by numberstumper on flickr]
----------------------------------------------------
Follow the markets at the TradeKing Blog, or learn more about options strategies from the Options Guy.