Registering Options

Managing trading & investments
1

Hi
I know this feature has been asked for previously & that SS has no plans to implement it but has anyone found a decent way to input options transactions into SS. What I do is input a custom holding followed by a buy transaction with price set to zero followed by a sell transaction with the premium divided by 100 as the share price. That makes the holding disappear from my list so I have to add another empty buy just to keep it under the open positions however having it at zero price isn’t ideal but at least I can see it under thge open positions. Appreciate any suggestions

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I think I’m in a slightly different situation to you but would also love some sort of solution. I mainly sell covered calls on my existing portfolio. What I’m hoping to achieve is the ability to get some sort of summary based upon the underlying position that shows my annual return against that position … here are my thoughts:

  • Enter the total proceeds from selling (and maybe buying back options) for the year as a unfranked dividend. Should show up in the performance for the stock over the long term as well as when I look at the multi-period report by Financial year. The downside is that it will show up in the taxable income report (so I’d need to export and delete out these transactions for accounting … although I think my accountant just uses whats in Xero anyway). It also doesn’t show up in the CGT and Unrealised CGT reports (which I like to use to help plan any tax loss selling).
  • Create custom holdings eg. Ticker.Option.OTHER for each underlying holding and treat them like a stock. I think the challenge for me there is it doesn’t match to the stock directly for percentage calculations and I will also go negative which sharesight hates (i.e. initial sell of an option is a capital gains tax event) … won’t let me sell a position I don’t have.
  • Create a completely cloned portfolio for the stocks that I am trading options against. Maybe use “return of capital” transaction when I sell an Option and “capital call” if I buy that option back. These show up as Capital Gains or Capital Losses (in the summary) but don’t seem to show up in the capital gains tax report.

There doesn’t seem to be anything great here so the more I think about it I reckon a dump of data out of Sharesight and then adding in the options proceeds for the year is probably the way to go.

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Hi Tristan,

I also occasionally sell covered calls, so it’s valuable to see how you account for them in Sharesight, many thanks. Your suggestion of using a “return of capital” seems to work well for me, though I record that in the main holding, not a clone. This seems to reflect well in the asset-level return calculation. I don’t use Sharesight for tax reporting, so no issue there.