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Refugee trader inquiry

Ancapistan

New member
Nov 25, 2021
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Due to ongoing madness of Russian government I chose to move out (basiaclly escape) of Russia (where I made my living as a stock trader) to Europe (due to family reasons to a progressive tax country) and to my surpise I discovered that trading is quite tricky in the EU.

Many Russian banks offer brokerage services. With those brokerage accounts you can day-trade as a complete psycho, making dozens of transactions every day. The good part is that you are only paying your taxes when (and if) you withdraw money from the brokerage account to the bank account. The amount is automatically calculated by the bank which is very convinient. There is an exception however for currency trading - you have to calculate your gains on your own and report those.

In the meanwhile, I read that in the US and perhaps (that's actually my question) in the EU what triggers tax liability is selling with profit. No matter whether you withdraw the money from the brokerage account or not.

So from what I understood, this is practically impossible to be a high-volume day trader in the US or EU due to progressive tax scale (almost everywhere in the EU) if you trade as a private person. Is that so, could someone please clarify?

And because of that people actually go ahead and setup companies to trade and invest because corporate taxes are not progressive...

I browsed the web and this particular forum for quite a while and it all seems to come down to the following: if you want to live in EU and make money from trading - reside (i.e. live for more than half a year) in Bulgaria/Romania/Hungary. Because even if you set up a company elsewhere but live in, say, Germany, you won't avoid those insane tax rates for big incomes.

Is that so? Please, correct me if I came to the wrong conlusions.

Also, I wonder, what if I live in Germany in 2022 and buy a stock for 10.000 euro, wait (so no day trading obviously) till if rises in price (say in 2025 while I still live in Germany) to 100.000 and then move from Germany to Bulgaria and sell it once I've lived 6 months in Bulgaria. Is this like the only legal way to pay 10% instead of gozilion procent? Or am I just going insane?

After all, what would be your advice to someone living in an EU progressive rate country who wants to trade/invest calmly and only pay taxes upon withdrawal of funds?
 
Also, I wonder, what if I live in Germany in 2022 and buy a stock for 10.000 euro, wait (so no day trading obviously) till if rises in price (say in 2025 while I still live in Germany) to 100.000 and then move from Germany to Bulgaria and sell it once I've lived 6 months in Bulgaria. Is this like the only legal way to pay 10% instead of gozilion procent? Or am I just going insane?
As far as I'm aware you'll have to pay exit tax in Germany in that case.

So from what I understood, this is practically impossible to be a high-volume day trader in the US or EU due to progressive tax scale (almost everywhere in the EU) if you trade as a private person. Is that so, could someone please clarify?
Capital gains tax is in most cases not progressive as far as I know. But it depends on the specific country I guess.
 
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In what country? That is not the case for all of the EU.
This is a quote from KPMG website on capital gains in Slovenia for example

"Capital gains are taxed at a 27.5 percent tax rate. The tax rate is reduced each 5 years of holding period (27.5 percent for the first 5 years of holding period; 20 percent for holding period 5 to 10 years, 15 percent for holding period 10 to 15 years, 10 percent for holding period 15 to 20 years, 0 percent after 20 years holding period). Consequently, any gains are exempt after a 20-year holding period."

Also it says in Wikipedia that CGT in case of a less-than-a-year hold it's 40% in that country.

Anyway I think anything above 15% is unreasonably high, which seems to almost always be the case...

As a matter of fact it now seems that Slovenia is the only country in the EU with such a thing so I agree I've been wrong on generalising about "progressive cgt". Though the issues in the first message remain...
 
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