MW How to sell losing stocks, offset gains and work around the 'wash-sale' rule
By Mark Hulbert
You can still do tax-loss selling for 2024 - but time is short
Many of the stocks that lose the most in a given year will jump after tax-loss selling ends.
Less than two weeks remain to tax-loss harvest your losing stocks, and it's not as easy as it may look.
The easy part of tax-loss selling is getting rid of a loser by Dec. 31. So long as you hold the stock in a taxable account, you will be able to use the loss to offset taxable capital gains for 2024.
The tricky part arises if you believe that your stock, despite the loss, is still a good investment. Because of the IRS' so-called "wash-sale rule," you can't repurchase those shares (or a "substantially identical" security) for 30 days after your sale, if you intend to use the loss to offset capital gains. Needless to say, you won't participate in any of the stock's gain during those 30 days.
Being out of your stock for 30 days is more than just a theoretical problem. Many of the stocks that lose the most in a given year will jump after tax-loss selling ends. So there's a real possibility that you will miss out on a rebound in your stock while you're out of it.
There is a potential workaround: Buy another stock that is similar to the one you sell, hold that substitute for 30 days, and then replace it with your original one. To the extent your substitute stock performs similarly to your original, you won't miss out on much during the 30-day wash-sale period - and you can still use the tax loss.
Note that your substitute stock can't be too similar to your original one. This especially is a problem when trying to harvest tax losses with exchange-traded funds (ETFs), rather than individual stocks. If you were to sell the SPDR S&P 500 ETF SPY, for example, you couldn't substitute Vanguard S&P 500 ETF VOO], since it is essentially identical. Yet since the IRS hasn't provided clear guidelines on what constitutes a "substantially identical" security, you may want to work with a financial adviser and/or tax attorney to be sure.
With individual stocks, you almost certainly can jump over the IRS' wash-sale hurdles - so long as you're not trying to substitute a different share class of the same stock. For example, you can't substitute Berkshire Hathaway Class B $(BRK.B)$ stock for the company's Class A shares $(BRK.A)$ and expect to harvest a tax loss.
Such situations aside, it's relatively straightforward to find another stock that should behave similarly to the one you sell at a loss. A good place to start is at the bottom of a ranking of stocks for year-to-date performance. (There are several websites that provide up-to-date rankings of year-to-date returns.) Look for a stock whose loss is the same order of magnitude as the one you own and which is in the same industry. Odds are good that both will perform similarly over that 30-day period.
For example, consider Halliburton Co. $(HAL)$, the oil services company whose stock earlier this week was in 470th place for year-to-date performance among the 500 stocks in the S&P 500 Index SPX, according to FactSet.
In 471st place, with an almost identical year-to-date return, was Schlumberger $(SLB)$, another oil services company. (See the chart above.) It's a good bet that, if you sell Halliburton from your taxable portfolio and substitute it with Schlumberger for 30 days, you could then harvest the tax loss and forfeit little if any of the return you would otherwise have realized by not selling Halliburton.
You won't always be able to find a substitute stock with such close profiles. If you can't, your next option would be to find an ETF benchmarked to the industry and sector of the stock you're selling. A helpful tool is the "Correlation Tracker" on the Select Sector SPDRs website. Entering a stock's ticker symbol and the tool tells you which of the Sector SPDR ETFs has the highest correlation coefficient. The higher the correlation, the more confident you can be in substituting the ETF for your newly sold stock over the 30-day period.
Even if you can't find the perfect substitute, harvesting your tax loss may still be worth it. If you're in the 20% bracket, for example, you can reduce your tax bill by as much as 20% of the proceeds when selling your losing position. That's a real gain.
Mark Hulbert is a regular contributor to MarketWatch. His Hulbert Ratings tracks investment newsletters that pay a flat fee to be audited. He can be reached at mark@hulbertratings.com
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-Mark Hulbert
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December 20, 2024 08:15 ET (13:15 GMT)
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