Taking partial capital loss purely for tax purposes
Note that the rules around wash sales vary depending on where you live. For the U.S., the wash sale rules say that you cannot buy a substantially identical stock or security within 30 days (before or after) your sale. So, you could sell your stock today to lock in the capital losses. However, you would then have to wait at least 30 days before purchasing it back. If you bought it back within 30 days, you would disqualify the capital loss event. The risk, of course, is that the stock's price goes up substantially while you are waiting for the wash sale period. It's up to you to determine if the risk outweighs the benefit of locking in your capital losses. Note that this applies regardless of whether you sell SOME or ALL of the stock. Or indeed, if we are talking about securities other than stocks. "When a question is phrased this way, i.e. ""for tax purposes"" I'm compelled to advise - Don't let the tax tail wag the investing dog.  In theory, one can create a loss, up to the $3K, and take it against ordinary income. When sold, the gains may be long term and be at a lower rate. In reality, if you are out of the stock for the required 30 days, it will shoot up in price. If you double up, as LittleAdv correctly offers, it will drop over the 30 days and negate any benefit. The investing dog's water bowl is half full."
Nominal. What you say is true, but I'm guessing it would be too complicated to modelate. Plus, a shareholder of a very large company would not necessarily experience said loss if he/she sells the stock in small chunks at a time. You can write industry loss warrants. This is the closest thing I’ve found since I’ve been interested in this side of the ILS trade. Hedge funds and asset managers can do this. From what I understand it’s you selling the risk.   Want to start a fund? 🤔 All that it is saying is that if you withdraw money from your account it doesn't matter whether it has come from dividends or capital gains, it is still a withdrawal. Of course you can only withdraw a capital gain if you sell part of the assets. You would only do this if it was the right time for you to sell the asset. If you received shares as part of a bonus you needed to pay income tax on the dollar valuse of those shares at the time you received them. This income tax is based on the dollar value of the bonus and has nothing to do with the shares. If you have since sold these shares you will need to report any capital gain or loss you made from their dollar value when you received them. If you made a gain you would need to pay capital gains tax on the profits (if you held them for more than a year you would get a discount on the capital gains tax you have to pay). If you made a loss you can use that capital loss to reduce any other capital gains in that income year, reduce any other income up to $3000 per year, or carry any additional capital loss forward to future income years to reduce any gains or income (up to $3000 per year) you do have in the future. This loss would be unrealized and, assuming you're a cash-basis tax-payer, you would not be able to take a loss on your 2014 tax return. This is similar to if you held a stock that lost 50% of its value. You wouldn't be able to claim this loss until you finally sold it.  The link that User58220 posted may come into play if you converted your UAH back to USD. "There are (at least) two problems with the argument suggested in the OP. First, the ability to cover the cost, doesn't mean willingness, ease, or no major side effects of doing so. Second is the mitigation of ""upside risk"". It might be true that the most usual loss is small and manageable, but 10% of incidents could be considerably larger and 1% may be very much larger - without limit.  Your own attitude to risk and loss will determine how much these are seen as unlikely+ignore, or worst case situation+avoid." "As Dilip said, if you want actual concrete, based in tax law, answers, please add the country (and if applicable, state) where you pay income tax. Also, knowing what tax bracket you're in would help as well, although I certainly understand if you're not comfortable sharing that. So, assuming the US... If you're in the 10% or 15% tax bracket, then you're already not paying any federal tax on the $3k long term gain, so purposely taking losses is pointless, and given that there's probably a cost to taking the loss (commission, SEC fee), you'd be losing money by doing so. Also, you won't be able to buy back the loser for 31 days without having the loss postponed due to the wash sale that would result. State tax is another matter, but (going by the table in this article), even using the highest low end tax rate (Tennessee at 6%), the $50 loss would only save you $3, which is probably less than the commission to sell the loser, so again you'd be losing money. And if you're in a state with no state income tax, then the loss wouldn't save you anything on taxes at the state level, but of course you'll still be paying to be able to take the loss. On the high end, you'd be saving 20% federal tax and 13.3% state tax (using the highest high end tax state, California, and ignoring (because I don't know :-) ) whether they tax long-term capital gains at the same rate as regular income or not), you'd be saving $50 * (20% + 13.3%) = $50 * 33.3% = $16.65. So for taxes, you're looking at saving between nothing and $16.65. And then you have to subtract from that the cost to achieve the loss, so even on the high end (which means (assuming a single filer)) you're making >$1 million), you're only saving about $10, and you're probably actually losing money. So I personally don't think taking a $50 loss to try to decrease taxes makes sense. However, if you really meant $500 or $5000, then it might (although if you're in the 10-15% brackets in a no income tax state, even then it wouldn't). So the answer to your final question is, ""It depends."" The only way to say for sure is, based on the country and state you're in, calculate what it will save you (if anything). As a general rule, you want to avoid letting the tax tail wag the dog. That is, your financial goal should be to end up with the most money, not to pay the least taxes. So while looking at the tax consequences of a transaction is a good idea, don't look at just the tax consequences, look at the consequences for your overall net worth." Since you say the money was invested in a corporation that would lead me to believe you mean a stock purchase. Stock losses can be treated as a tax exemption filed as a capital loss.  http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Taxes/Cutyourtaxes/P33438.asp http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/columnist/krantz/2006-03-10-capital-losses_x.htm Canada has slightly more restrictions on how this can be done.  http://www.taxtips.ca/filing/capitallosses.htm "As long as the losing business is not considered ""passive activity"" or ""hobby"", then yes. Passive Activity is an activity where you do not have to actively do anything to generate income. For example - royalties or rentals. Hobby is an activity that doesn't generate profit. Generally, if your business doesn't consistently generate profit (the IRS looks at 3 out of the last 5 years), it may be characterized as hobby. For hobby, loss deduction is limited by the hobby income and the 2% AGI threshold." You are correct. She cannot claim the initial loss of $1,000 on her taxes, she can only report the $500 profit. However, the IRS does allow her to add the $1,000 loss to the basis cost of her replacement shares. e.g. "While you'd need to pay tax if you realized a capital gain on the sale of your car, you generally can't deduct any loss arising from the sale of ""personal use property"". Cars are personal use property. Refer to Canada Revenue Agency – Personal-use property losses.  Quote: [...] if you have a capital loss, you usually cannot deduct that   loss when you calculate your income for the year. In addition, you   cannot use the loss to decrease capital gains on other personal-use   property. This is because if a property depreciates through personal   use, the resulting loss on its disposition is a personal expense. There are some exceptions. Read up at the source links." Yes, an overall $500 loss on the stock can be claimed. Since the day trader sold both lots she acquired, the Wash Sale rule has no net impact on her taxes. The Wash Sale rule would come into play if within thirty days of second sale, she purchased the stock a third time. Then she would have to amend her taxes because claiming the $500 loss would no longer be a valid under the Wash Sale rule. It would have to be added to the cost basis of the most recent purchase. The loss for B can be used to write off the gain for A.  You will fill out a schedule 3 with cost base and proceeds of disposition.  This will give you a $0 capital gain for the year and an amount of $5 (50% of the $10 loss) you can carry forward to offset future capital gains.  You can also file a T1-a and carry the losses back up to 3 years if you're so inclined.  It can't be used to offset other income (unless you die). Your C and D trades can't be on income account except for very unusual circumstances.  It's not generally acceptable to the CRA for you to use 2 separate accounting methods.  There are some intricacies but you should probably just use capital gains.   There is one caveat that if you do short sales of Canadian listed securities, they will be on income account unless you fill out form T-123 and elect to have them all treated as capital gains. I just remembered one wrinkle in carrying forward capital losses.  They don't reduce your capital gains anymore, but they reduce your taxable income.  This means your net income won't be reduced and any benefits that are calculated from that (line 236), will not get an increase. No, if you are taking a loss solely and purely to reduce the tax you have to pay, then it is not a good strategy, in fact it is a very bad strategy, no matter what country you are in. No investment choice should be made solely due to your tax consequeses. If you are paying tax that means you made a profit, if you made a loss just to save some tax then you are loosing money. The whole point of investing is to make money not lose it. If so, are there ways to reduce the amount of taxes owed? Given that it's currently December, I suppose I could sell half of what I want now, and the other half in January and it would split the tax burden over 2 years instead, but beyond that, are there any strategies for tax reduction in this scenario? One possibility is to also sell stocks that have gone down since you bought them.  Of course, you would only do this if you have changed your mind about the stock's prospects since you bought it -- that is, it has gone down and you no longer think it will go up enough to be worth holding it.  When you sell stocks, any losses you take can offset any gains, so if you sell one stock for a gain of $10,000 and another for a loss of $5,000, you will only be taxed on your net gain of $5,000. Even if you think your down stock could go back up, you could sell it to realize the loss, and then buy it back later at the lower price (as long as you're not worried it will go up in the meantime).  However, you need to wait at least 30 days before rebuying the stock to avoid wash sale rules.  This practice is known as tax loss harvesting.