Share trading and tax

[titus]

Originally Posted by quarky
EXACTLY.
you hit the nail on the head, swm79.

i'm NOT trying to make CGT _nil_.
my aim is to compensate for the losses, of the under-performing ones...i.e. after i make the sell for 1 stock that profited me, i need to know how much of the ones that i am already holding, i need to offload... i.e. an EQUAL amount.

if i end up paying CGT, for the 'excess', that's fine...because the way i see it:
- i REALLLLY need to pull the money out of the no-hoper stocks...seriously
- even if do pay a bit of CGT _after_ that, that's negligble for me, because the loss is so great that i can't buy a property if i don't pull that money out.

so, my aim is not to reduce CGT but offset the losses of the stocks that i will be selling, with the profits of what i sold, EQUALLY.

and my question was, to figure out how it worked for selling stocks (that made a profit, obviously) within 12 months and after 12 months, and how that affects how much i need to sell of the stocks (e.g. "ABC") that will give me definite losses.

Not sure if I understand exactly what you mean but I'll give it a go...

Are you saying that if you made a profit on XYZ shares of say $3000 and you want to sell some of your poor performing shares (e.g. ABC shares) so as to eliminate or minimise your CGT bill, how much of ABC shares would you have to sell?

Well if you have held XYZ shares for >12 months then you can get a 50% discount on CGT which means that only $1500 of your profit will be taxed at your marginal rate. If held for <12 months you pay CGT on the full $3000. If you want to offset this gain with AN EQUAL AMOUNT of losses then you sell ABC at a price which will give you a loss of either $3000 or $1500, whatever is applicable. So if say you have 3000 shares of ABC and you bought them for $4, when the price is $3 and you sell then you have made a loss of $3000 (disregarding brokerage and other costs).

I may have over-simplified your question, so apologies if I interpreted it incorrectly.