The Trader's Tax Survival Guide (A Marketplace Book)

Rating:
Summary: Dishonest Title
Review: A high priced disappointment. That sums it up for me. If the title had been The Investor's Tax Survival Guide, it would have been worth a rating of three to four. However, as a trader, I found myself wading through page after page of irrelevant information. I found much better information free on the internet specifically aimed at traders.

Rating:
Summary: Too One Track and aggressive in perspective
Review: This book gives a unique point of view so, it does not duplicate what you can get in other tax books. It advocates you try to qualify for 'Trader Status', and there are several Supreme Court tax cases concerning this difficult to qualify status. This status means that your TRADE as a serious business, hold postions for generally less than a month. All your expenses become fully deductable on Schedule C, HOWEVER you lose Capital Gain treatment AND must pay Social Security and Medicare taxes on your Self Employment income but you can set up a pension plan and/or SEP IRA. I think there is too great a danger of a nasty IRS audit, and not enough taxes saved. A difficult route for a Futures Trader, nearly impossible for a Stock trader except for some SOES traders.

Rating:
Summary: Misleading title
Review: Unfortunately, the title of this book has little to do with its content. If you're looking for nitty gritty details on tax strategies for active stock traders, you'll be disappointed to find only one chapter that comes close.

Tesser provides useful tax advice for the general taxpayer, which makes me wonder why he did not call the book something like, "Beating the IRS After Tax Reform." Odds are the publisher wanted to take advantage of the boom in daytrading and online brokerages.