Wait, is that true? You mean that realizing gains of 400k from things bought long time ago (what @Flabbergast mostly has done here, with the exception of the 3 months), would be equally a ‘prof. trader flag’ as when realizing 400k with an intra-day trade?
Thats hard to believe?
I’m not a lawyer, but if you trade commercially (e.g. in a limited company), you are not forced to account at prices bought, but can mark to market.
So, if you are classified as a professional securities trader for a certain period, I see no reason, why you couldn’t mark to market at the beginning of that period. (@oslasho ?)
I read Kreisscheiben nr 36, and it says, in the case that those 5 criteria are not fulfilled, an assessment is done.
In section 4.3.2 it gives the weighting of the assessment, and the most important first listed weighting, is: the frequency of trading, and the volume of trading. Things like using derivatives come only after that in importance.
So is it then not likely that they consider this as a professional trading activity after all?
I accidently replied a ‘general’ reply to your specific post, but I do have a question about your post: what does marking to market mean? Compared to when are the capital gains compared to if you mark it this way?
And is having a commercial company (limited company, …) required for doing this? Or can an individual person count for this?
If you do accounting for a business (as opposed to private/non-business activities of a natural person), you have a book. In the book you have assets, and those have values. There are laws about what those values can be. For publicly traded securities that have a market price, you can not only:
but alternatively:
And there might be more possibilities.
If you choose the second option, there is a difference on your balance sheet in all likeliness, and that difference will be taxed.
But of course only that difference and not the difference to the price you bought at. That you already paid in previous periods (or not, because this was private assets, and there is no capital gains tax for those).
The stocks also went up because of unrealized capital gains, do they also count for this balance sheet difference?
But I don’t have any accounting/books now since I’m a private person. If they would retroactively decide I was doing professional trading in this period, would I be able to have books/accounting about this past period? Or would I still be a private person, not be able to have this, and be required to do option 1 (value to price bought)?
Take an educated guess.
If you don’t know, and can’t reconstruct, how much you had at the beginning of a period, you can probably also not know for how much you bought.
Then the value is probably assumed as 0 and you’ll pay taxes on the whole sale price.
But reconstructing your holdings for a recent period up until now isn’t hard. All brokers can tell you what you bought and sold for many years back.
I really don’t know… I’d hope that only the income you pay to yourself (if that is something you can even do as a single-person non-company who became seen as a professional trader) would count as actual income and unrealized capital gains are not actually usable income. But I don’t know much about balance sheets currently (e.g. whether and how your stocks are listed on them)
Look, I suggest we stop the discussion here. @Flabbergast , you stop panicking and go back to live your life. This is not the first time this discussion is popping up, the arguments are always the same, and we still haven’t heard any real stories about some investors being taxed as pro traders.
We should program some kind of bot, that auto-answers this before a post with questions regarding this gets through a filter or something 
Hi all,
I moved from Zurich to Vaud and I am worried about being classified as a professional investor here. I am on a sabbatical from my IT job in all of 2024 and lived solely from selling stocks (no other income).
Should I go to the tax authorities myself to clarify (is this even possible?)? Or does anyone know a tax advisor specialized on such cases?
Not knowing how I will be taxed is a heavy burden on me, any help on how to gain clarity in advance would be highly appreciated.
Thank you.
Don’t worry, you won’t be classified as professional.
Welcome, @D.Welch !
As @nabalzbhf says, don’t worry.
If you’d like to read up on some of the rules when you might be classified as a pro, there’s many (IMO) hyperbole discussions about this on this forum, typically fizzling out.
I’ve summarized my view here.
Enjoy your sabbatical!
Also if you do end up being classified there’s a lot of tax optimization to do around tax loss harvesting (which is also one reason why they are not eager to classify people 
)
Thank you for the welcome, and for giving me hope. I really appreciate it.
Would your estimation still be the same if I add these additional details?
Currently I am paying a tax consultant who tells me that the canton of Vaud is difficult to talk to for a situation like mine and that I would need to hire them for more research on the topic to provide me with certainty. I have a bad gut feeling about that being a money drain, which is why I ended up here.
Again, thank you so much.
Yes, nothing here shows professional behavior.
You can check https://www.estv.admin.ch/dam/estv/fr/dokumente/dbst/kreisschreiben/dbst-ks-2012-1-036-d-fr.pdf.download.pdf/dbst-ks-2012-1-036-d-fr.pdf yourself for how they decide (in particular the details in “4. Activité lucrative indépendante portant sur des titres (commerce professionnel de titres)”.
It’s about the intent, what you did is managing your wealth, not trying to beat the market/be a professional investor.
As @nabalzbhf says, you’re good, it seems.
Ahahahaha.
I would seriously consider changing your tax consultant. These guys seem to want to milk you.
With a call, it is unlikely that the tax authorities will confirm something in written in a no name basis. Even if they do, it won’t apply to D.Welch.
Thank you for merging my topic into this thread. I have since read all of the posts here and start to understand how exotic it seems to be classified as pro investor.
It was my new tax consultant in Vaud who imbued these fears in me, as they signaled that they were reaaaally unsure about all this, a borderline case that needed to be thoroughly researched (case files etc.). This stood in strong contrast to my tax consultant in Zurich, who assured me that in Zurich, there was no way to become a pro investor with my profile. He also mentioned to me that there were only a hand full of people in all of Zurich who were classified as pros and that they had Bloomberg terminals at home etc.
My decision forward is to break ties with my Vaud consultant and simply file the taxes myself (As new FIRE, stocks are my only income/wealth, so seems fairly simple). Given all the information in this thread, I understand the worst that could happen is that I get flagged for a sudden wealth increase due to my sale, but I could explain that with my long positions.
Really great to have this forum and the knowledge everyone is sharing. Hope my story can help others as well.
Hello Colleagues
My neighbour is investing since two decades and has a big Portfolio.
In the next stock market crash, he intends to take a 100k loan from his bank to make best use of it.
I cannot believe that this should be possible, without getting assigned the „pro investor“ status where the tax department will then take taxes on your capitol gains.
I would never take a loan to invest in equity…
What are your thoughts on this stupid idea? Is it stupid or am I stupid by being a conservative investor that only takes a loan on my house, but for nothing Else.
Thanks
Stefan