On Capital Gains & Losses Part VII

Today and next week we will wrap up our series on Capital Gains & Losses. I guess it really should have been titled dealing with capital losses due to what we've covered. Today I'm posting a quick link of all our previous posts on this subject. A one stop shop so to speak of everything we've covered so far.

We began back in June with a Barron's article that served as the genesis for this series. http://lumencapital.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-capital-gains-losses-part-i.html. After that we laid out the reality of how long term investors are carrying losses on this book for most of the past ten years: http://lumencapital.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-capital-gains-losses-part-ii.html. We then held a Q& A on some questions I'd received: http://lumencapital.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-capital-gains-losses-part-iii.html Next we discussed the frustration that investors have likely been feeling http://lumencapital.blogspot.com/2009/06/on-capital-gains-losses-part-iv.html and then we broke the issue of losses into three categories: bad investment timing http://lumencapital.blogspot.com/2009/07/on-capital-gains-losses-part-v1.html wrong investment thesis & accounting irregularities http://lumencapital.blogspot.com/2009/07/on-capital-gains-losses-part-v2.html and finally http://lumencapital.blogspot.com/2009/07/on-capital-gains-losses-part-v3.html market crashes. Last week we gave a brief overview of the tax laws regarding capital losses. Next week we'll finish up the series by discussing how to implement tax harvesting in portfolios.