Why sell now, unfortunately the tax man cometh. I'm still debating this question and have yet to decide. I'd love to here what others think about this. I have lots of realized gains and a huge unrealized TDFX loss. This is the the problem:
Say you have 10,000 in gains short term
At about 40% rate I will need to pay 4,000
If I sell enough TDFX to offset the gain, I don't have to fork over the extra money.
I need to ride it out 31 days to get back in.
I can take the proceeds and put it into a similar stock to get some participation. The trick is finding a similar stock but then there's lots of them to choose from.
The downside, I hate selling just to save money on taxes. TDFX is running right now with real nice volume. The time to sell was two months ago - not now. Buying it back makes me wait longer to get to long term gain holding period. If TDFX does eventually hit my expectation, next year's bill will be much larger since I now have a much lower cost.
The other problem I'm having is trying to decide whether position trading is better than just buy and hold. Most of my money goes into mutual funds that I rarely if ever sell. I take a small hit each year and for the most part the money keeps building on itself. On the other hand, position trading has been very very good to me. Problem is I have to set aside a lot more money to pay the taxes each year so I can't invest all my gains. This eats into my return and I sometimes wonder if all the work is worth it. For example, say the funds go up about 30% and I trade to a 50% gain. After paying the taxes on the 50% the return is somewhat similar. Makes you wonder if the extra risk and work was worth it.
Anyway, I'm rambling now but I wonder what you guys think. Joe C. |
