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Interactive Brokers Account Statement Shows Certain Short Term Capital Gain Losses as a Positive value

Personal Finance & Money Asked by inetplumber on August 12, 2021

I have been actively day trading for a few months and recently have been investigating my account statements in a detailed manner. I am unable to fully understand what is sometimes occurring in the "Realized and Unrealized Performance Summary" portion of the base Activity statement.

Realized PnL Summary with S/T Loss that is positive

Somehow I was able to generate a positive Short term loss?

Researching more, IB displays this explanatory information about the fields.

PnL Fields Description

However, for this symbol, there is no options activity in my account. There are related instruments that I do trade options on, however I don’t believe that IB would do a net calculation on a short UVXY, short VXX put for PnL calculation purposes. Furthermore, there are instruments I do trade options on, and I am able to reconcile the PnL (covered calls for example), but once again….the positive S/T loss column values reappear and I am confused by the accounting conventions.

For background, I am regularly shorting UVXY in this scenario, and there are frequent wash sales with adjusted basis, and that was the case in the time period this statement was covering. I am somewhat new to wash sale accounting, but mostly understand the dynamics. I believe it is correct to say that in short sales, the wash sale rule is causing my losses to be deducted from the basis of the subsequent opening trade.

In any case, I was hoping this situation has happened to others before or is a standard accounting methodology and I could learn more. Googling and IB’s help hasn’t yield anything too enlightening yet.

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