Talk:Wash sale

Terrific detailed discussion
A terrific detailed discussion is available at this site and subsequent pages that it links http://www.tradelogsoftware.com/tax-topics/wash-sales/what-is-the-irs-wash-sale-rule/

Assessment comment
Substituted at 10:16, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

IRS Citation
The original author of the "Consequences" section appears to have gotten the 3-bullet list of consequences from IRS Publication 550, so I included it as the citation.

DenverCoder9 (talk)

Split "Tax loss harvesting" section into separate article.
I have tagged this article for a split. I believe the "tax loss harvesting" subject warrants a separate article. That subject seems to be highly technical, and not involved in wash sales other than incidentally, so the text does not belong here in wash sale. There is also a whiff of somebody promoting some kind of financial advising or scheming in the business of tax loss harvesting, or perhaps it's just a mild case of WP:HOWTO'ing. Richard J Kinch (talk) 13:53, 10 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Support. I agree that splitting tax loss harvesting to a separate article would be good. They are related topics in that you want to avoid a wash sale when attempting to implement tax loss harvesting.  They are not the same thing.  Tax loss harvesting per se is not that complicated.  It is a common tool utilized by many financial advisors.  Mean variance optimization is not needed or desirable in most cases.  The description of tax loss harvesting is OK, but the addition of mean variance equations makes things more confusing, and is not that helpful in my opinion.  The description could be improved / clarified by making it clear that the mean variance info is "special case".TPeekema (talk) 00:05, 17 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Oppose. I don't think a split is warranted until the content is better sourced and cleaned up, as well as formatted, but ultimately you seem to be correct in your assessment in that they are not perfect synonyms. 70.240.207.189 (talk) 20:08, 17 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I did clean the content up, and am not convinced entirely that a split is needed. They apparently are very related, and the variance equations will make things confusing for readers no matter where on Wikipedia they are placed. I'm not entirely averse to splitting as I don't believe it would hurt anything, but the section under question is still quite small, and doesn't really do any damage as is to the wash sale page. If the section grows larger, a split might make more sense still, but I don't think the equations should influence that decision. 70.240.207.189 (talk) 08:10, 21 December 2019 (UTC)


 * Support. A split along this line would make sense; wash sales are primarily a tax topic whereas loss harvesting is generally considered an investment strategy that concerns itself with being tax efficient. However, I also agree with remarks that the article is confusing and unfocused in several places. For example, the introduction starts by defining a wash sale as a specific pattern of trades, but then starts describing investment strategies (bed and breakfasting/loss harvesting). Those strategies may need to be aware of wash sale rules moreso than others (not made clear in the article), but any series of trades that fits the defined pattern is considered a wash sale. The way it reads makes it sound like "wash sale-ing" is a category of strategies that deliberately engage in the defined trading pattern, and I have not encountered that usage of the term. As a result, I would propose adding (or changing this tag to) a {cleanup rewrite} and revisiting a split/move/merge of sections after the content is clearly separated. ZemoreJuno (talk) 18:44, 17 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Support In my experience reading about this, I often encounter tax loss harvesting as a subject independent of wash sales. So it's possible both subjects are notable in their own right. Harej (talk) 18:27, 18 October 2021 (UTC)