1) if i had asked before, from the beginning i would give a direct explanation as to what IRAS has told me. instead of relying information from IRAS website.
And the information on IRAS' website is vague and useless so it serves no purpose, they even tell you to contact them.
2) its good for your case that you dont need to pay tax. but is your situation, frequency of trades, volume, etc the same as others? does it apply to everyone?
Maybe not but it can be "made to apply to everyone". IRAS has no way of knowing how frequently you trade or what size you use, they are 100% reliant on what you tell them. Jesus did I have to make it this clear?
3) my intention is very clear. one should get a written explanation to confirm with IRAS themselves. at least one has a proof to cover his a$$ in the future. instead of relying of what others have said.
IRAS is not going to reject money from you if you die die want to give it to them. If you call up the taxman and tell them that this is your only "job" and you make 200k per year they will certainly send you a tax form. But if you use your brain a little and realise that IRAS is never going to bother with you, and that they wouldn't have a good explanation for taxing you and not giving you tax credits for trading losses, you will know better than to tell them the "truth".
4) to make things more complicated, someone posted before about this tax thing. he was told that the trading income is taxable for his case.
http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/54264014-post14.html
Honestly I don't trust this guy. First of all I don't know of any retail forex guys that can consistently make money over the long run, forex is a killing field and its a massively rigged game for retail. Secondly 20-25 orders monthly is not an awful lot of trades, many retirees who punt on penny stocks on sgx put in far more than trades than that. When I first started, I traded on sgx and I did it with a broker who offered preferential rates for people who can hit a certain amount of volume each month, people in that group were trading far more frequently than 20-25 orders per month and none of them paid taxes, of course some of them were losing money so they didn't last very long but the ones that were net profitable weren't paying taxes.
End of the day, its you who decides if you want to pay taxes because IRAS doesn't have a clear yardstick for this and they have no way of knowing the details of your trades, lots of people would fall into this grey area of "possibly taxable, but maybe not" category. Its just not possible to institute a fair taxation program for this group of people without a capital gains tax.
Anyway this has gone way off-topic, I don't think TS is interested in paying taxes just to secure a loan from a bank, that'd be really dumb.