Transcript:
Easan Arulanantham:
I have some large, taxable gains on some positions, and they’re not doing as well as the market and kind of poorly underperforming. What should I do about these positions?
Tom Vaughan:
Yeah, this has been a really common thing, especially in the taxable accounts that we have, in 2020. You know, the broad market indexes that I really like were kind of underperforming, because such a big chunk of the economy was essentially closed down, you know, airline miles at one point drop 96%, you know, some of these crazy things that energy and all of these areas dropped because people are moving around. And so all of that money started to be funneled into smaller areas, innovative technology, you know, genomics and Clean Energy were the three biggies. And we ended up with some phenomenal returns and those, but they peaked out in February of last year. And so what do you do with that? It’s very interesting, right? So if it’s in an IRA, we, we basically got rid of most of those and went back into more diversified portfolio in the first half of last year, most of it in March of last year. So that worked out well, because they’ve come down some more. But in the taxable accounts, you know, you have these big gains. And so this is a really interesting question. And a situation where, you know, people want really no taxes, and in a perfect world, and maximum returns. But when you have this, we’re in the middle of a pandemic, and when you have these kind of cyclical things that are happening, and you had to go into one area that skyrocketed, made you a gain, and is now falling out of favor, you know, you need to sell those, you need to take the gains, as far as that goes. And so we have been very aggressively this year, certainly very aggressively selling those pieces. And taking some of the gains, I’d rather have the clients call me up to take the money out of their account, to pay the taxes than have the gains disappear. And so that’s, I think that’s strategically, it is difficult to figure out, when you should take gains, that’s more of an art than a science, I will always give you know, fairly high levels of latitude to a position, especially one that’s kind of cyclical, in hopes that it continues to rebound and come back. But honestly, if it gets past half of the game, I have an $80,000 gain, and it gets down to 40,000 probably going to take that $40,000 game, even though it’s painful to pay the taxes, it’s better than having that game turn into $10,000, you’re better off paying the tax.
And I And so sometimes that’s an interesting, you know, conversation with people is just this concept of, you know, net rate of return after tax. And it’s not easy, generally speaking, taxable accounts, which is what I have set up now, my portfolios are more broad based, not so cyclical, not so you know, up and down. And so they maybe we can hold on to those for the long term, you know, the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, the Vanguard, S&P 500, index, and, and these types of things that tend to be more Bellwether, all all, you know, all weather type of accounts versus these more narrow pieces that we were kind of forced into in 2020. And so it’s going to be a little bit of a painful transaction transition, because the taxation, but it is something really important to kind of understand that sometimes it’s worth paying the tax, if you put tax as your number one criteria on an account, that is taxable lowering tax. First of all, you have to have a very special portfolio to make that work. And it’s very likely that you might make less than then you would if you were able to just look at it from a net after tax rate of return standpoint. And that’s just my opinion. But that’s, that’s been my, you know, my outlook and what I’ve experienced here also, -you know, for these positions, do you ever just are, there’s like that short term and long term gains. So like, when you do this calculation, are you thinking about like, Hey, I’m a couple months away from a long term gain, is it worthwhile just to risk it, too, to wait till that, you know, that one year hits?
Yeah, no, that’s a good question. I hate short term gains. You know, having said that, I have a lot a lot of clients that are in a 15% tax bracket and capital gains and probably 24% tax bracket on short term gains, you know, ordinary ordinary income, the state attacks might add another two or 3%. So you kind of have to look at that and know what’s happening right now. Right? So am I gonna wait two or three months and lose that difference? Because, honestly, what is that 10 11% difference, so two or three months, if you’ve got a position that’s falling pretty hard, we lose that easy. So I’ll take I’ll take a 2% I’ll take a short term gain if I need to. Again, I try to and this is not scientific, but I try to use kind of a half As as the key, if I’ve got an $80,000 gain that’s turned into $40,000 gain, you know, whether short term or long term if I feel you know, negatively about that position and really trending downward, you know, I’m going to get out of it. And also, there’s some future thought process. I mean, you have to think about it, like, think about, you know, what’s happening. So Small Cap stocks are taking it in the chin, especially the small growth stocks, which is not an unusual situation in a higher inflationary environment. Because when interest rates go up the multiples, you know, those companies are selling for a lot more times their earnings if they have earnings. And so they tend to sell off in these environments even more. So again, it depends on the situation. It’s not there’s not a scientific, you know, rule of thumb there, but, boy, I sure have watched a lot of people, you know, let gains disappear in order to avoid taxation. I think that doesn’t make sense to me. I’d rather pay a short term gain if I had to