About Us

I’ve told this story so many times over the years that I guess it’s about time that I tell the world.

Since 1980 I had been involved in process control and factory floor automation, and as such gained a wide variety of experience, especially with software. But don’t worry, I won’t bore you with my resume!

Fast forward seventeen years…I found myself trading stocks and options. Someone sent me a bunch of tapes about a taxi driver who struck it rich trading options, and I couldn’t help myself!

Early Beginnings

Being the analytical sort I created a rather elaborate Excel spreadsheet to keep track of my trades. You know, match up the buys and sells and calculate my profit or loss so I could see how good or bad I was doing in the market.

I read somewhere that every trader would do well to keep a comprehensive log of their trades. I believe it was Dr. Alexander Elder of www.elder.com who put the idea in my head, so I will give him credit where credit is due.

In any event, I traded quite successfully for many months, mostly selling covered calls at Etrade.com. They were one of the early online brokers who made it easy to trade online and I still have an IRA trading account with them.

About this time my brother-in-law started day trading stocks with more powerful brokers such as Terra Nova Trading, Datek, and Cybertrader who were known for their fast executions. As such he generated many thousands of trades per year and desperately needed some help keeping track of things. So I gave him my spreadsheet.

Now, Tim was an exceptional trader, but he was by no means a computer jock. He found my spreadsheet too complex and time consuming to use. So I decided to write a program and both of us could simplify our trade tracking.

At that time Visual Basic was bloated and still in its infancy, and I had already done some programming with Borland Delphi (formerly Turbo Pascal) and liked the environment. It compiles fast, produces tight compact code, and you end up with only one executable file rather than many files as with VB.

Selling on the Internet

Tim liked the software so much that he suggested that I try to sell it on the Internet. Hey, that sounded like a great idea! So in late 1999, I created a web site, named my software TradeLog™ and started to sell it online.

Immediately we saw results. Kind of like the commercial where the Internet guys watched their sales counter start spinning out of control! Fortunately, my counter did not spin quite that fast. But once I started creating import filters for the various online brokers and users found that they didn’t have to manually enter this stuff, then sales really started to take off.

Importing from Online Brokers

The first few broker import filters that I developed were for those brokers where either Tim or myself had accounts. I logged in, browsed around the accounts services and tax sections of their web sites, and found the most suitable trade history report and did a screen scrape or import from a downloaded csv or text file. – Simple eh?

Not quite. You would think that all brokers have a concise report and that they provide everything that one needs for trade analysis and tax reporting on this report – NOT! Please read our Brokerage Reporting tax topic to see what I mean.

So with lots of sweat, blood, and tears, we eventually were able to create import filters for over 35 different online brokerages with virtually no assistance from the brokers. When one of our users came to us and asked if their broker could be added to the list, we were able to do so either by logging into their account (if they let us) or by sending us what they were able to copy or download themselves, and we figured out the rest.

But why do it that way? Are there not more elegant methods of importing one’s trades from the online brokers such as OFX which used by many of our competitors?

OFX is a complex banking interface and is not supported by many brokers. It also is quite limited in how it presents the data as far as short selling and options are concerned. In addition, many brokers limit how far back you can go such as the last 180 or even last 90 days worth of history. Not much help when it is April 2 and you need all of last year’s data.

Times have changed a bit since then. We have so many traders using our software that the brokers are now calling us, and more importantly working with us to make the whole process more seamless. Our brokerConnect™ import method is a prime example of what can be done when we have the broker’s attention.

Tax Issues – Schedule D and Wash Sales

Also very early on in our development we began to realize that the biggest pain had to do with taxes. I remember the first year that I was faced with manually entering my trades on schedule d. What a pain in the neck! Next came the issue of dealing with the wash sale rule.

But hey, I’m a smart guy. I know how to program. This rule should not be that hard to code – NOT!

The IRS wash sale rule is an absolute nightmare for active traders! I have said this so many times my mouth hurts. And I have spent the last 6 years of my life, and part of my wife’s life, desperately trying to get a handle on all of the many nuances of this rule. Every tax season one or another of our users come up with still another scenario that we have never seen, or a combination of trades that would make Isaac Newton sick to his stomach.

But I believe we have arrived. I can now say with no reservations, that our TradeLog™ software is the most IRS compliant trader tax software on the planet! (At least as far as the US tax code for schedule d / wash sales is concerned.)

There may be cheaper solutions, there are even those who are trying their best to copy us, but none of them match the speed, simplicity, and accuracy of our TradeLog™ software. Of that fact we are quite sure!

Wishing you the best,

David N Eich, President
Armen Computing Ltd.