Re: Interactive Brokers transaction Import

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In Reply to: Interactive Brokers transaction Import posted by Didier on August 06, 2005 at 11:42:01:

: Mark,

: I made some tests with the reports that can be created in my Interactive Broker reports management page. There are daily and Monthly reports. Different report formats are offered and I found that some of them like MS money, Quicken and Gainskeeper look like OFX format, although no mention is made anywhere of OFX on the IB web site.
: I can import transactions in FM with those reports, if I define the files as .OFX.
: There are some problems though: The different currency transactions are not handled appropriately. Everything goes in the default US dollar Cash Investment, regardless of the CAD or Euro, whatever.
: Is there a solution to this problem?
: Also, the import function does not allow specifying OFX format with other file extensions, in this case IB generate reports with whimsical extensions, so I always have to change them manually.
: IB is the account where I have the most transactions; I would really like to have complete automatic import of the transactions on this one.

Hello Didier,

Do the transactions get imported into the Cash Investment, or are you saying that all the corresponding cash is always taken out of or goes into the cash investment?

Here is how it should work... The transactions should all go into the investment with the matching symbol. So, for example, if you bought INTC you should see a purchase in INTC, and a corresponding sell of Cash, for the same exchange rate adjusted value. The values should match across currencies, so if you bought something for 100 Swiss Francs and your default cash account is in USD, the cash would get debited for about $79, assuming 1 Swiss Franc equals 0.79 USD. The cash sell goes into the account assigned as the default cash account for the sub-portfolio. Each sub-portfolio can have 1 investment assigned as the default cash account. You can't have one assigned for each currency. Do you have different cash accounts for each currency? If so, you might want to set up separate sub-portfolios for each currency in the broker, so you could assign each one a different cash account.

When doing the import the "Browse..." feature will always look for a .OFX or .QFX file extension, but you can manually type in any filename you want into the edit box on the main import dialog. It would be good for us to add an optional filter for All (*.*) on the Browse... dialog.

Thanks,
Mark
--
Mark Beiley
Fund Manager, portfolio management software for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/00/XP/2003

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