Automate the calculation of yearly taxes for a tastyworks export in the context of the German private asset management tax situation.
🚨 WARNING ON TAXES FOR OPTIONS TRADING
If you have over 20,000 EUR in annual revenue from options trading, you will be taxed on this revenue even if you did not actually earn a profit!
Losses from "terminating transactions" (Termingeschäfte) such as options are subject to a 20,000 EUR deduction limit per year in Germany. This is as per § 20 Abs. 6 Satz 5 EStG (Einkommensteuergesetz).
Any losses above 20,000 EUR cannot be deducted from taxable income and are carried forward to future years.
This means with options trading revenue over 20,000 EUR, you may pay taxes on that revenue even if your actual profit is lower due to undeductible losses.
Development Status:
- Currently, the program does not differentiate between various asset classes; it only recognizes stocks and options. This does not accurately reflect all trading scenarios.
- Please triple-check your results. Accurately assigning losses, profits, fees, interest, etc., to their specific categories is challenging.
Stocks:
- Gains and losses are calculated using the FIFO (first-in, first-out) method.
- Transaction costs are fully deductible when incurred.
- Other account and deposit fees are already covered under the flat rate operating expenses deduction.
- Dividends from certain German companies like Vonovia, Deutsche Telekom, Freenet are tax-free.
- Losses can only be offset against gains from stocks in the same year. Remaining losses are carried forward indefinitely.
Options:
- Each option trade is settled individually, no combined calculation for complex strategies.
- For writing (selling) options, the full premium received is immediately taxed at the time of sale.
- For closing out a written option, the premium paid is deducted and lowers the taxable income.
- For buying options, gains/losses are calculated similar to stocks based on sale proceeds less purchase costs using the FIFO method.
Before running the project, ensure all dependencies are installed. Execute the following command:
pip install -r requirements.txt- Go to https://my.tastytrade.com/app.html#/trading/activity
- Set the date filter.
- Set to show only "filled" trades.
- Click the little "upload" button (it's an upload symbol, not download) to export.
- Export limit is now 1000 rows.
- If you use the new platform, you need to convert the new data format to the old format using the
legacy.pytool. - New data format might be mergable automatically.
After installing the dependencies, you can run the main program using:
python tastyworksTaxes/main.py [ --write-closed-trades <output-file.csv> ] <tastyworks-data.csv>
The project uses pytest for test-driven development. To run tests, use:
pytest test/
The project also incorporates doctest to test interactive examples within docstrings. These tests can be triggered by executing:
python -m doctest tastyworksTaxes/*.py
- I am not an expert, there is tax law I don't know
- No special treatment for ETF
- ETF advance tax payment ("Vorabpauschale") is not implemented. This is a yearly fictitious taxable income on accumulating ETFs, calculated as 70% of the base interest rate × fund value at start of year, minus actual distributions. Required by German tax law since 2018 to prevent tax deferral.
- Partial exemption rates ("Teilfreistellung") for different fund types are not implemented (e.g. 30% for equity funds, 15% for mixed funds)
- Symbol changes currently count as sales. While this simplification doesn't matter if you sell within the same year, it's simply wrong.
- I am not sure about fee calculations.
- In the case of short selling stocks (beyond an annual limit), 30% of the price is taxed with the capital gains tax as a substitute assessment base (§ 43a Absatz 2 Satz 7 EStG), and only offset with the covering. This is not implemented.
Contributions are welcome, this software was a lot of work. Try opening an issue or better a pull request
This software is under the MIT License.