On Tuesday, May 7, 2013 6:49:20 AM UTC-7,
malo...@gmail.com wrote:
> Ok here is my situation, I traded stocks for 2 years and I was mostly
> unaware of how these differed in terms of tax then straddle trades but i'm
> coming to realize that I'm in big trouble. i'm a kid who thought he had a
> good idea and here is what happened. I traded butterfly spreads for credit
> spreads so for example I bought 40 calls sold 80 of the next higher strike
> and then bought 40 more calls at the next higher strike netting me 50 bucks
> or so. I sometimes would make a little more on the trades after the fact but
> my gains in 2011 were about 20k and i lost about 10k in 2012.
> but in the trades would be huge amounts. For example i would buy 1m worth
> of the 40 then sell 2m worth of the 80 calls and then by another million of
> the 40 calls. so if they all expired worthless i would have 2m of losses
> and 2m of gains. well i had wash sales in january and well from what I
> gather because of these wash sales I owe somewhere north of 1m dollars in
> tax. I make 30k a year and really have no assets at all, and I
> don't even have money to pay a lawyer to try and help me straighten this
> out. What am I supposed to do? this doesn't seem right. I was never trying
> to evade taxes by selling stock to lock in losses. i never had access to any
> of the money i supposedly owe, and I never made or probably will never make
> enough in my lifetime to pay these taxes. any advice out there?
Are you saying tat in 2012 you had $1M of gains and $1M of losses, but because you bought/sold stock in Jan/2013 the wash sale rule kicked, and your $1M loss was disallowed (although the disallowed loss is carried forward). As a result you have just a huge gain that you have to pay tax on?
Does the 1099-B explicitly say wash sale for some of the sells? That is, is box 5 blank?
As a trader you must be aware of the intricacies of trading, and that means:
(1) Understanding the wash sale rule.
(2) Understand the trader status election. See
http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc429.html. This lets you ignore the wash sale for securities that you trade as a trader, as well the $3000 limit on losses. But there are many intricacies, such as whether you trade for a living, etc. It's anyway too late to take trader status on your 2012 tax return.
(3) The Dodd-Frank bill bans certain types of trades that are supposed to be too complex and "undermine" faith in the market. See
http://dodd-frank.com/cftc-reiterates-that-wash-trades-are-grave-violations-in-penalizing-two-experienced-traders-for-wash-trading/ which says that wash trades are grave violations subject to prosecution. I remember reading an article over a year ago that gave more details about the types of trades that are banned but can't seem to remember. BTW,
intrade.com shut down because of Dodd-Frank.