Nope...who are they and what do they do? Taxes/ accounting? Many of the places I have visited are afraid to speak out sometimes because of liability concerns...here someone will be able to post a reply and voice their opinion on some of these issues without fear of liability...some of these accounting and taxes issues are left to interpretation...even by the IRS or an auditor...one person may interpret things differently than another...from what I hear if you know the law and back things up with the facts you are ok...most of this stuff is based on precedence and if you are aware of actual case histories where an individual trader was called and put on the carpet, and then after a battle with uncle sam....wins....then you may be able to use that as precedence for your position...this forum that Baron has allowed us to have will help us all to help one another zero in and document and create a history on this stuff.
Thanks for your post and I agree, but I don't really feel like becoming an expert in the tax code, so was considering tax services. Green and Tesser have both written books about taxes/accounting/entities specifically for traders......they both offer tax services, etc. specifically for traders. Green has regular articles in Active Trader. I was considering using one of the two and am curious if anybody had any experiences with either of these guys...... JCM
Is there any real advantage to creating a legal entity, or even claiming trading as one's business? I believe that one would have to pay self-employment taxes of about 15% if he had a trading business and deducted expenses. I think the maximum would be around $9,000, so if trading expenses (not commissions which are deductible anyway) aren't greater than $9,000 where is the advantage? I guess if you consider the self-employment tax to be a good investment it would be okay, but if not, why bother having a business? Am I missing something here? It seems to make more sense to me to just treat my trades as investments since my expenses aren't anywhere near $9,000. Or maybe I'm not considering some potential expenses. Any thoughts?
Baron, I like the title you gave this forum -- Self Employment. I really appreciate titles that are self explanatory. I also applaud the fact that you moved this up to a major sub-heading under trading. I was thinking that it needed to be a major category -- and there it was! I like the idea of elitetrade.com being the site for traders to link into available info./discussion on self employment issues. Not sure the business side of trading will ever be my first love. I tend to view it as a necessary evil (I just wanna trade...trade...trade), but I appreciate the impact it has on my financial well-being.