If you use TradeStation and you want to log all of your day trade transactions into Quicken, try TS2QIF , my TradeStation-to-Quicken transaction converter. Spend about one minute at the end of each day, and get all of your transactions into Quicken for easy tracking.
Downloading and preparing TS2QIF:
Using TS2QIF daily after your TradeStation session is complete
- Download TS2QIF and save to a temporary directory
- Use WinZip to unzip TS2QIF.ZIP into a new directory - under your QuickenW directory is easy - for example, "c:\Program Files\QuickenW\TradeStationLogs". Unzip TS2QIF.exe as well as all sample batch scripts into this directory.
- In TradeStation, open the Account Manager window
- Select either the Todays Positions tab, or if you want previous data, use Historical Positions
- Click the "+" (changes to "-") on any partial-fill transactions to get all the details
- Press Ctrl-A (or from the menu, Edit / Select All) to mark all transactions
- Press Ctrl-C (or from the menu, Edit / Copy) to copy all transaction data
- Open Windows Explorer, change to your Quicken\TradeStationLogs directory, Right Click, New, Text File
- Name this new text file to include your name and the date, e.g., HamFon20020531.txt. The date format is yyyymmdd where yyyy is year, mm is two digit month (01 - 12), and dd is two digit date (01 - 31)
- Double click the new text file in Windows Explorer to open it
- Press Ctrl-V (or from the menu, Edit / Paste) to insert all of the transaction data, Save, Exit
- Start TS2QIF by double clicking on it in Windows Explorer
- Enter the full text file name you just created (HamFon20020531.txt, for example)
- TS2QIF processes that file, and creates a .qif file with the same name: HamFon20020531.qif
- Enter "!X" to quit TS2QIF
- From Quicken, select your TradeStation brokerage account, then from the menu, Import
NOTE - since the SEC fees are calculated by Bear Stearns and given to TradeStation, they may be off by a small amount. The SEC fees are added to the commission for Sell and Short Sell transactions, but TS2QIF creates an extra MiscExp line at the end of each day that shows the amount of SEC fees that it calculated. When you get your daily statements, check the SEC fee total and make adjustments, if needed, at this line.
NOTE - This is how I make sure the SEC fees are correct each day:
Sounds pretty complicated, but after a couple of days, you should be able to get the whole procedure done in about a minute.
TS2QIF supports the "flat" directory structure where all data files are in the same directory as the TS2QIF program. However, to make things more organized, and easier to find, TS2QIF also supports a hierarchical directory structure. From the main directory (for example, "c:\Program Files\QuickenW\TradeStationLogs") which contains TS2QIF.exe, you can make a directory for each year (name the directories 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, etc.). Then, under each year, make a directory for each month - two digits - 01, 02, 03, ... 11, 12. Under each of the monthly directories, save your data files - for example, ham20030103.txt would be stored in the "c:\Program Files\QuickenW\TradeStationLogs\2003\01" directory. This greatly reduces the clutter in the original TradeStationLogs directory. You can convert your existing setup by moving all .txt and .qif files in the original directory into appropriate subdirectories.
Report generation using TS2QIFI use TS2QIF every day to summarize my transactions. This gives me an idea of how well I am doing, and also tells me about specific things that are useful for expense reporting - like the total SEC fee, and the total commission. Also, it can list how many good and bad short and long trades were made each day, and the total profit or loss from short or long positions. To use these features, see the sample MS-DOS Batch files included in the download zip file. NOTE - before using the sample batch files, you MUST edit them (using WordPad or NotePad) to change "ham" (that's me!) to the code that you have been using to name the data files you have saved from TradeStation. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me. I have included several sample reports - check out each one to see what numbers are useful to you. There are three different reports that generate daily information for a month: month_brief, month_detail, and month_summary. Each of these will display information for the current month and year. If you want to look at a previous month or year, you can use month_brief_ask, month_detail_ask, and month_summary_ask to have TS2QIF ask you what month and year you would like to see. There are also two "monthly" reports that show monthly summaries for the current year (or you can choose the year using the _ask version): monthly_brief, and monthly_summary. You can run any of these reports from Windows Explorer by double clicking on them - or create shortcuts on your desktop or Start Bar.
Advanced usage of TS2QIF
TS2QIF offers quite a few other features than just dumping transactions to a qif file. It will calculate summaries for you (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly), including commissions, SEC fees, your profits and losses, etc. To access all of these features, it's easiest to open an MS-DOS Command Line box, change to the directory that contains TS2QIF (c:\program files\quickenw\TradeStationLogs, if you followed the directions above), and run it from there.
Go to HamFon's daytrade page.