Guide
You traded on eToro, it is tax time, and the account statement is a dense spreadsheet. Here is what it actually gives you, the parts it quietly leaves you to work out, and how to get to a figure you can put in a return.
Ask eToro for the account statement for the financial year and you get a workbook: your deposits, every closed position with its open and close dates and prices, dividends, and the fees taken along the way. That is genuinely most of what a tax return needs — but it is a record of what happened, not a tax calculation, and a few things stand between it and a number you can file.
A large share of eToro trading is done through contracts for difference (CFDs) — leveraged positions where you never own the underlying asset. Under the ATO's ruling on the matter, gains and losses on CFDs are ordinary income on revenue account, not capital gains, and they get no capital gains discount at any holding period. Shares and ETFs you actually own are capital gains assets. Mixing the two into one figure is the most common way an eToro return goes wrong, and the statement does not separate them for you.
An individual who holds a capital gains asset for more than twelve months can generally discount the taxable gain by half. The catch is that the test is applied to each parcel separately, on its own acquisition date — not to an average holding period across a holding. Buy the same share three times and sell some, and which parcels you are treated as selling changes the answer.
eToro prices most positions in US dollars, but Australian capital gains are worked out in Australian dollars — and not at today's exchange rate. Each transaction is converted at the rate that applied on its own date. A holding that rose in US-dollar terms can show a different gain, or even a loss, once the currency movement between the buy and the sell is counted. Skipping this, or using one flat rate, quietly moves the figure.
Positions opened by copying another investor are, for tax, your disposals like any other — each one a line the return has to account for. A copy portfolio can turn into hundreds of small parcels, each with its own dates and currency conversion.
By hand, the job is: split the closed positions into CFDs (revenue account) and owned assets (capital gains); convert each to Australian dollars at its transaction-date rate; match sells to buys parcel by parcel; apply the 12-month discount only where a parcel qualifies; net losses off gains in the order that helps most; and total the fees. A spreadsheet can do it, and plenty of people build one every July.
Daybook is software that does exactly that walk, on your own computer, from the same eToro statement. It reads the workbook, separates the streams, converts every line at the Reserve Bank's daily rate, tests the discount per parcel, and prepares the working papers as a PDF you can check or hand to an accountant. It is a free download; the prepared tax report is the paid part.
See what Daybook does →Free to download. Runs on your computer. Nothing uploaded.
Not tax advice. This is general information about how some Australian tax rules apply to investing, not advice about your circumstances, and not a substitute for the ATO or a registered tax agent. Whether you are an investor or carrying on a business, and how a particular position is treated, can depend on facts this page does not know. Check the rules at ato.gov.au, or with your accountant, before you file.
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