Easy way to identify underwater lots?

Rocket J Squirrel

I've been poking around QWin's tax-related & investment-related features and am having a little trouble. I would like to identify all currently held security lots which are underwater so I could sell them to harvest tax losses.

(Un)fortunately, I have almost no loss to harvest so far this year. But the near future may be different because everyone is whispering "correction."  Just wondering what the easiest way to identify underwater lots is.

bmciance

What about creating an investing view?  I have a view that when I click on and account and then a security it will show me the lots for that security.  I have numerous columns including  Cost Basis, Market Value and Gain/Loss.  Viewed at the lot level you can scan to see any that are negative.  

miklk

Usually I just show the holdings on Portfolio tab and sort by gain/loss (Still need to expand lots)

Also, Portfolio Tab Tools Capital Gains Estimator works but is too clunky for my taste

Sherlock

Isn't that something the Capital Gains Estimator tool does?

Rocket J Squirrel

Sherlock said:

Isn't that something the Capital Gains Estimator tool does?

You would think so, but I can't get it to work at all. No matter what I enter into it, I get the same result:

Rocket J Squirrel

bmciance said:

What about creating an investing view?  I have a view that when I click on and account and then a security it will show me the lots for that security.  I have numerous columns including  Cost Basis, Market Value and Gain/Loss.  Viewed at the lot level you can scan to see any that are negative.  

miklk said:

Usually I just show the holdings on Portfolio tab and sort by gain/loss (Still need to expand lots)

Yes, this is what I've been doing. This means manually eyeballing lots and looking for the red numbers under Gain/Loss.

It's clunky to find a view that allows expanding lots. Some do, some don't. I'm sure there's a way to determine which view setups allow expanding lots, but I haven't yet spent the brain cycles to figure that out.

The Capital Gains Estimator is way overkill. All I really want is a simple Report that displays all lots in taxable accounts that are showing losses.

Chris_QPW

Rocket J Squirrel said:

Sherlock said:

Isn't that something the Capital Gains Estimator tool does?

You would think so, but I can't get it to work at all. No matter what I enter into it, I get the same result:

When you get to this dialog, click on Settings:

Rocket J Squirrel

Chris_QPW said:

When you get to this dialog, click on Settings:

It's not that simple. I have set the settings as permissive as possible (100% and 3600 seconds).

I've been using the "custom" objectives. If the objective "Minimize capital gains" is "Extremely important" and all other objectives are "Not important", it fails with the message shown above.

If I change the objective to "Offset YTD Gains", which I guess is the right one, it simply stops running, displaying this:

Repeated presses of Start return to this same state.

If I use one of the built-in objectives, "Balance my YTD capital gains (get close to $0)", I get results which are simply wrong; it advises me to sell more shares that are above water and doesn't find the lots which are underwater.

So I think CGE is buggy. Has anyone gotten good results from it?

Chris_QPW

Frankly I used it years ago, but never touched it since.

But given your goal of wanting to find the underwater lots what I would do is pick any scenario that "solves" so that you can get to the result/"What if scenarios" from there you can just scroll down selecting the lots that are negative:
Like selecting here:


Of course it would be nice it it would do this automatically and there might be a way, but given that it didn't work for you and it always is complaining that I didn't set the tax rate values when I did...

This seems like another long forgotten feature, that who knows works right or not.

Chris_QPW

BTW now that I think about it when I used it years ago I didn't really use any of the scenarios.  So I have no idea if they were real working back then even then.  I just used the what if section there checking lights on and off that I said I might want to sell or something and seeing the tax result.

q_lurker

I’ve never gotten anywhere with Cap Gains Estimator. 

With a portfolio view you can only expand lots of the view is grouped by Account. 

With any group by setting, you can sort the view by the Gain/loss column - click the header.  But still, only by accounts allows the lot expansion and those rows do not get sorted. 

So the best I can offer = 
Portfolio view
Limit to taxable accounts
Group by Accounts
Sort by Gain/Loss - min at top
Expand some of those min gains in each account. 
Eyeball for specific lots to sell