Without an export feature I have had to manually copy and paste the details for each transaction into a spreadsheet in order to calculate my profit/loss and taxes due.

I contacted Etrade about this, and pointed out that their US site (and most other online brokers) offer an export feature but they didn't really seem to care.

Think 160 times before signing up with Etrade UK, or you will regret it come tax time!

Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 8:27 PM
To: uksupport@etrade.com
Dear Sir or Madam,

I am trying to find out how to download my account/trade history from my account (for import into excel, etc). I see that the US site has this option under "accounts" but the UK equities site does not appear to.

Cheers,
Gordon

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
UK Customer Support <uk-customersupport@etrade.com> Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 9:10 AM
To: Gordon <***********@*.com>
Dear Mr,

Thank you for your email, apologies for the delay in getting back to you. In response to your email with regards to importing account history onto excel, unfortunately we do not offer the facility on our website. However our website is currently undergoing development and we are finding new ways of improving the facilities we offer. Hopefully we can accommodate this feature in the near future.

Should you require any further assistance please contact our client services department on 0845 234 34 34 or <mailto:uksupport@etrade.com>

Kind regards,
Jaynesh Shah
Client Services Representative

E*TRADE Securities Limited
42nd Floor
One Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London E14 5AA
T: 0845 234 34 34

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Gordon [mailto:**********@*.com]
Sent: 15 April 2008 20:28
To: #UK Support
Subject: export account history

Gordon <**********@*.com> Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 11:35 AM
To: UK Customer Support <uk-customersupport@etrade.com>
Dear Jaynesh Shah,

Thank you for your response. I can not stress enough how important this feature is to myself and many other traders. Without an export feature taxes, analysis, etc are all quite impossible (without manually copying the data for each trade) which is very undesirable for active traders. Your American site does offer the feature (detailed here: http://www.armencomp.com/tradelog/etrade.shtml ).

I hope that you implement this feature in the very near future, in the meantime I have applied for an Iweb share trading account and shall move my business across as soon as it is open. I hope that you will forward this email to management, now is not the time for Etrade's offerings (especially when a simple programming fix can solve the issue) to be lacking.

Thank you again for your time.

Kindest Regards,
Gordon

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Gordon<**********@*.com> Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 6:29 PM
To: UK Customer Support <uk-customersupport@etrade.com>

Please be advised I have moved £***,*** out of this etrade account and will move the remaining funds away from etrade as soon as possible simply because you do not have an EXPORT account history option (your american site does). Without this feature creating tax and profit/loss reports takes hours of manual work.

Hoping you add this feature in the next week.... another customer lost.

Regards,
Gordon

Adobe sell the product for $1599 on the US site coming in $1,209 cheaper than the UK store list price of £1404.02 ($2,808). Even without VAT (UK Tax) the product is £1,195 ($2,390) from the UK store, a $790 premium over the US price.

You will need a US credit card / billing address to purchase from the US store.

I'm sure if Adobe ever comment on the matter they will come up with something along the lines of "UK support costs.....". Well I don't know about any of you, but I have never in my life called any sort of software technical support line.

Shame on Adobe for charging Brits nearly twice the amount that they charge people in the US.

Akamai is one of those existing CDNs. If you haven't dealt with Akamai before the bottom line is that you pay 10x what you would if you built your own solution, but even that wouldn't add up to $50m.

Jump TV state that they

"provides live streams of some 300 ethnic television shows from 75 nations. Expats, immigrants and foreign language speakers subscribe to the programming which is delivered to the PC. It is also a huge distributor of online sports streaming, providing some 200 sports programs from 30 nations. "

Wonderful, congratulations! But we could also say that Putfile (the site I created and sold) provides millions of video streams to every single internet enabled country on earth. Providing "300 ethnic television shows to 75 countries" doesn't mean that you are pushing masses of traffic (X gig/sec).

The graph below compares the reach (viewers) of Putfile vs. JumpTV.

The graph clearly shows that Putfile has 4x the reach of JumpTV. Putfile doesn't use a $50m CDN, nor a $500,000 CDN for that matter.

Out of interest I priced up a custom solution involving 10 gig/sec of bandwidth from 10 cities worldwide with 10tb of redundant data storage (about 10 times what would be required by an operation like JumpTV) just to see if I could get anywhere close to $50m.

Spec: 10 cities worldwide with 1 gig/sec premium bandwidth per city. 10 gigs/sec bandwidth with 10tb of replicated data.

Per Location:

• $20,000 colocation and bandwidth / month
• RAID 5 arrays, 10tb of fully redundant data storage. $30,000 one off cost
• Front end servers * 10 to connect to storage arrays $20,000 one off cost
• Database servers keep track of "where" data is replicated to $20,000.
• Programming $100,000 one off cost

Total cost per month: $200,000

One off hardware and software: $420,000

Cost of running for 1 year $2,820,000

I believe that the above quoted capacity is 10x what is needed, and that $282,000/year would be a more realistic running cost.

I propose that JumpTV actually purchased $49m worth of powerpoint presentations and $1m worth of CDN.

With the new proposal in place there is to be no more taper relief. The sale of business, and other, assets will be taxed at 18%. This may not seem tragic to you but bare in mind a sole person who has slaved 100 hours a week and invested all of his life savings into starting up a business, has paid ~20% corporate tax on all earnings, and then up to ~40% personal income tax on any salary that he wishes to take whilst running the business.

This will affect me greatly, in July 2006 I founded a new company (a shell essentially) OBDTech Limited which I would use to develop my next business or idea as soon as I was ready to.

One of my proposed business plans involves generating £1.6m yearly revenue and a target sale price of £5m after three years of operation. The UK government would of received the following taxes from my operating the business in the UK:

• Corporate tax over three years = £960,000
• Income tax on 5 salaries totalling £200,000 for three years = £180,000
• VAT (sales tax) over three years = £840,000
• 10% CGT tax when the business sold = £500,000

Total tax: £2,480,000. This business would of kept 5 employees in full time employment.

My post tax gain from selling my 51% of the business would of been £2,295,000. With the new proposal in place I would receive £2,091,000 a post tax difference of £204,000.

This increase of 8% tax on my final earnings is enough to make me consider relocating myself and/or the business outside of the UK, potentially losing the UK £2,480,000 in tax revenue. I'm sure a lot of entrepreneurs are thinking along the same lines.

Related articles:

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• Entrepreneurs feel hammered again
• The impact of capital gains tax changes
• John Redwood's Views