Welcome to the Basis Program. This program has been designed to help you enter and track your stock trading information with special emphasis placed on enabling you to easily determine the basis of a trade.
Every year, your broker sends you a 1099b that contains a list of your transactions of the year, listing your buys and sells separately. A copy of this is sent to the IRS. You are responsible to report on your tax return On Schedule D every sale and it's basis. You then subtract the basis from the net proceeds from the sale to determine your gain or loss. You also must enter the trade dates of the buy and the sell in order to determine whether it was a short or long-term capital gain (or loss).
The list of sells on your 1099b is useful. You can use it to enter all the proceeds from sales and sell dates for the year. The list of buys is less useful. It only contains the purchases for the year. Any stock that you might have bought prior to Jan 1 will not appear on this year's 1099b. You need to "dig" and find the information yourself. If you don't remember which year you bought it, it could be difficult to find this important information. The Basis program enables you to enter this buy information and retrieve it easily when you need it.
