Hi Guys
Quick question. You are considered to be trading if you trade ALSI or CFDs and not investing right? Therefore, you will file that under trading activities and not capital gains on efiling? The problem I have is how do one determine what your sales and proceeds are with futures, cause you buys contracts and not shares.
Spoke to SARS earlier and they don't know what futures trading is and advised me to put in under capital gains which I consider incorrect as the contracts are not kept for 3 years to be considered capital gains.
Any advice on how to complete my return?
This is pure income tax and should be classified so.
Usually I just skip the entire income statement and simply capture my profit/loss at the end.
Together with that attach your annual statement reflecting said net profit/loss and done.
This is technically incorrect but doing a full income statement confuses the hell out of the illiterates working for SARS, and so far it has worked fine for me.
BTW, trade through a company...and not your personal name.
I would argue that you could still claim all expenses (brokerage, interest etc) in personal name under section 11 a - but this complicates things unnecessarily and SARS might finger you on this, especially claiming brokers fees and such.
Anyway, here is what I do - and I find it pretty tax effecient, whilst staying within the rules and keeping it "dumb" enough for SARS employee not to raise eyebrow and utter "Ehhhhh".
Keep 2 accounts.
1. Long term portfolio in personal name (If you wondered why personal - due to cap gains annual exemption which is quite useful). Just note, SARS are very strict on the 3 year rule...so easy on the selling in here.
2. Trade account in business name. (28% tax and deduct all expenses)
And if you are really a good sport like me, you leverage off the LTP, BUT borrow in the name of your company in #2 then you can deduct some more finance costs off those profits