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Sunday, February 11, 2018

Automated Tax Loss Harvesting


Both of the largest robo advisors advertises that they use automated tax loss harvesting in which they take short term losses and then buy equivalent securities thus taking short term capital gains losses that can be netted against future gains. Wealthfront says it does this through "direct indexing" i.e. trades of individual stocks. Of course each time you book one of these losses it is not a free lunch. The cost basis is lowered so the potential tax liability is higher.


I have absolutely no idea how well these robo advisors executed their strategy on Feb 5. But with a swing between highs and lows of in excess of 6% it must have been quite complicated. During the rest of the week the swings between high and low were in excess of 4% except for Feb 6.

3 month chart of  S+P 500 ETF:


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