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A comment on What's The End Goal for Wealthfront and Betterment? (2016). Parent comment

Re:What's The End Goal for Wealthfront and Betterment? (2016) by mrkurt on Sunday March 26, 2017 @01:23PM (#13961844)
The cap is on deductions from regular income if you have a capital loss for a year.

So if you have $50,000 in capital gains and $53,000 in capital losses, your gains are "free". And you can deduct the extra $3k from ordinary income.

You can also carry capital losses forward each year.

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Re:What's The End Goal for Wealthfront and Betterment? (2016) by dragontamer on Sunday March 26, 2017 @01:42PM (#13961957)
Yeah. If you have $50,000 in gains but $53000 in losses, then that's called a bad year.

You still aren't getting around the fact that you made a crappy investment somewhere to generate that loss.

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Re:What's The End Goal for Wealthfront and Betterment? (2016) by sulam on Sunday March 26, 2017 @03:28PM (#13962623)
Every portfolio has a mix of gains and losses if it's well diversified. I have gains that offset the losses elsewhere, but a reasonable chunk of those gains is offset by losses realized in parts of the portfolio that didn't do so well.

If you have a diversified portfolio that is all gains, I think you're probably not actually diversified.

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Re:What's The End Goal for Wealthfront and Betterment? (2016) by dragontamer on Sunday March 26, 2017 @04:35PM (#13963117)
Vanguard total market.

Diversified, but generally speaking it gains every year.

And no. Your portfolio is not as diverse as the entire market. Period.

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Re:What's The End Goal for Wealthfront and Betterment? (2016) by sulam on Monday March 27, 2017 @04:01AM (#13965908)
Of course it isn't. But which market?

Anyway, we are talking past each other.

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Re:What's The End Goal for Wealthfront and Betterment? (2016) by mrkurt on Monday March 27, 2017 @02:03PM (#13970143)
That's not really how tax loss harvesting works. You can have a portfolio that's up a total of $50k and _still_ have $50k in losses.
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