I asked the same question on Shareville, but I’ll post it here too, in case there are experts here.
So, a tricky question about the taxation of an Equity Savings Account (OST) / the amount of money that can be deposited, as I can’t get a sensible answer from Nordnet’s customer service.
Let’s take a situation where your Equity Savings Account (OST) is initially empty, and you first deposit 10,000 euros into the account and buy shares worth 8,000 euros (incl. trading costs). You are left with 2,000 euros in cash. The shares rise by, say, 20% in a week, and you then decide that you need the remaining 2,000 euros for something other than buying rising stocks. So you keep the shares in your portfolio and don’t sell them. However, you decide to transfer the remaining 2,000 euros back to your Securities Account (AOT) and withdraw them from there to your own account. What do you think happens with this withdrawal? Do you pay tax on anything? How much more money can you deposit into the OST after this? According to my understanding, the answer should be that no taxes are incurred because you are only transferring uninvested cash back to another account. And you should still be able to invest 42,000 euros into the OST. Or have I misunderstood something here?
I just have a similar situation with my OST, where in the initial phase I shuffled some cash between the OST and AOT. I did roughly this:
6.3.2020: First deposit to OST 7000 euros
6.3.2020: Bought Citycon and Wärtsilä so that 33.50 euros remained in the account
9.3.2020: New deposit 5000 euros. So account balance 5,033.50 euros
9.3.2020: Bought Nordea and Fortum for a total of 4175.1 euros (incl. trading costs), so the account balance remained 858.4e.
9.3.2020: On the same day, I decided to transfer 850 euros back to the AOT, because there was so much to buy on that side that I needed every euro there. The OST balance remained 8.40 euros. However, Nordnet had automatically split this withdrawal into two: -847.52 EUR (type: OST WITHDRAWAL) and -2.48 EUR (type: WITHDRAWAL, without OST marking)
11.3.2020: I managed to transfer more money from my current account to the AOT and then transferred 1750 euros from there to the OST, balance 1758.40. At the same time, I bought Fortum so that the OST balance remained 31.15e.
11.3.2020 - 12.3.2020: I again scraped more money from other accounts to the AOT and made additional deposits of 12,000 euros to the OST and bought a bit of this and that for the OST so that the balance after purchases was 1082.35 euros.
13.3.2020: I again withdrew 1000 euros from the OST because I needed it for purchases on the AOT side as the stock market sale continued. Nordnet did not split this withdrawal into two like the previous one.
13.3.2020 - end of year: I only made deposits and purchases, the first dividends came into the portfolio only on 30.3.2020
I calculated that I made deposits from AOT to OST in 2020 totaling 42,250 euros and made withdrawals from OST back to AOT totaling 1,850 euros. All withdrawals were made in the early part of the year before any dividends came into the portfolio and there were no sales in the portfolio. So, if I deduct the withdrawals, I have put 40,400 euros in cash into the OST.
Since the OST limit is 50,000 euros, according to my calculation, there should still be room for 9,600 euros in the account, but Nordnet’s system states “You can still deposit into the account: 9597.52 EUR”. So there is a 2.48 euro discrepancy. This means, according to Nordnet, I can never deposit 50,000 euros into the account, meaning I will never get a return on that missing 2.48 euros. I wouldn’t really bother complaining about a couple of euros, but as a coder, this is interesting because I think there’s a bug there, but Nordnet doesn’t seem interested. That 2.48 euro discrepancy fits exactly with that split withdrawal on 9.3.2020. It’s also possible that I have completely misunderstood the taxation/withdrawals of this OST…
When I asked about this, Nordnet’s customer service only gave me this generic answer, which I didn’t really understand:
Please note that capital gains are also considered taxable income in an Equity Savings Account (OST):
For tax purposes, it does not matter how the return was generated (dividend, interest, appreciation of the investment, currency exchange gain on an account in a currency other than euros) or in what order. Thus, in addition to realized capital gains from shares, the unrealized appreciation of shares acquired for the account is also considered income from the Equity Savings Account when funds are withdrawn from the account.
Veikkaisin, että nuo saman päivän sisällä 9.3.2020 tapahtuneet talletukset, ostot ja nosto on jotenkin sekoittanut tätä laskentaa.