I think schweser went out of the way to make this more confusing than it is. That is all
To add my comment…I don’t know about this tax harvesting thing. I understand the concept behind it and it makes sense. However, it sounds like to ME a positive spin on a negative event. Client “My account is losing money!” IA: “Oh, I was doing it on purpose, so I can harvest some tax loss”. Maybe I am overreacting…just feel like this is a way for us to excuse some negative performance. Just some of my feeling when I read it…nothing else (GD, I sound like a woman)
If my financial advisor ever told me he was losing money on purpose to harvest loses, I’d fire him and send a complaint to the appropriate regulatory body. You tax loss harvest because something has gone down in value, not the other way around. We regularly tax loss harvest positions then immediately invest in another complimentary asset to stay in the market. Or, we use the sale to rebalance the account.
Exactly, you decide to recognize a capital loss to counterbalance any recognized capital gains taken in the period. YOu don’t by Bear Stearns stock to lose money on purpose to use as a tax credit, that is just stupid talk :). If you don’t have any losses in your portfolio then you have no loss to harvest…
I have never been able to do this. What is it again and why would anyone want to learn about it?
Sorry, bad example I was using. Right, I understand all that. As much as we all like to see our “recommendation”/“suggestion” go up. Sometime, they do go down. I just felt that using tax-harvest sounds like a nice way of getting around saying we got it wrong. “Well, Joe, remember the 1000 shares BSC I told you to buy? I F***ed up.” Compares to “Well, Joe, reemember the 1000 shares of BSC we bought? Now would be nice time to harvest some tax loss.” The second statement sounds little better, don’t you think??
You don’t “sell the assets” you “Transfer the assets” 
bigwilly Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > You don’t “sell the assets” you “Transfer the > assets” Exactly! BTW, did you graduate from ML?
haha…
"Now that we’re selling that 20% gain you got, maybe we should sell these 10% losses so that we reduce the income tax bill. We can reapply the proceeds to MFC (My favorite company), which my analyst recommended after a hard night at the bar. 
bchadwick Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > "Now that we’re selling that 20% gain you got, > maybe we should sell these 10% losses so that we > reduce the income tax bill. We can reapply the > proceeds to MFC (My favorite company), which my > analyst recommended after a hard night at the bar. > May I use that as my sales script??