Question: How should I handle cost basis after a spin-off on T212 for UK tax purposes?
T212 processed the S&P Global (SPGI) → Mobility Global (MBGL) spin-off by keeping the SPGI position unchanged and assigning the new MBGL shares a $0 average price.
My concern is that, for CGT purposes, the original SPGI cost basis should be split between SPGI and MBGL. T212’s approach works for showing portfolio value, but it does not give me the adjusted cost basis needed for tax records.
The problem is that once I buy more shares, the app’s average price no longer lets me easily reconstruct the correct pre-spin-off cost basis.
Has anyone dealt with this for tax purposes? Do you manually calculate the adjusted cost basis, or is there a way to get a historical cost basis/average price report from the app?
I wonder if HMRC has any guidance on this. If not, it might be worth contacting them to ask how to allocate the cost basis.
I searched online and found this, I think the case for a new type of share might be relevant, but it’s not exactly the same as the spin-off case:
I actually raised this with T212 and they said they would forward it to the dev team.
Looking into it further, I found that many US brokers automatically adjust the cost basis after a spin-off to reflect the allocation of capital between the parent and the new company.
For example, Merrill Edge states in their Cost Basis FAQs that the cost basis can change due to a spin-off and that they automatically adjust the cost basis for affected securities.
It would be extremely useful if Trading 212 could support similar adjustments, otherwise we’d have to manually keep track of the true cost basis for positions manually.
Agree on this - there is a U.K. tax thread.
The thing is 212 don’t give tax advice, nor can they see if you hold any positions of the same stocks in other brokers so it really is on the user.
There’s a couple open source projects on GitHub for tracking costs and running taxes but you do need to check their output.