FYI, for those that use Merrill Edge as a brokerage. Today I noticed some welcome new options for selecting shares when selling in a taxable account. I haven't seen any announcement but noticed the changes while poking around. I use ETFs at Merrill Edge so can't speak about mutual funds.
Until now, share selection had some limitations which were perhaps not dealbreakers, but rather inconvenient. Whereas some brokerages offer various options for share selection, Merrill Edge had two: First In/First Out and "Choose specific shares". When choosing specific shares, the selection of tax lot was left entirely to the user and only 4 lots could be used in a given sale. You would also need to know how many shares you intended to sell before selection.
As of today, I don't see any language restricting the number of tax lots. My own holdings have a max of 8 lots and I was able to select from all of them. The number of shares to sell can now be changed on the fly from the share selection screen. And unless I had previously failed to notice, there are buttons for filtering the tax lots and selecting shares more conveniently. "Auto select" facilitates FIFO, LIFO, Largest unrealized gain ($), Largest unrealized loss ($), Highest unit cost, and Lowest unit cost; as well as facilitating selection by holding period (short term, long term, or both).
While a knowledgeable user could previously work around the interface manually, I consider the new tools to be helpful, especially allowing more than 4 tax lots to be used in one sale.![:beer]( "beer")
Until now, share selection had some limitations which were perhaps not dealbreakers, but rather inconvenient. Whereas some brokerages offer various options for share selection, Merrill Edge had two: First In/First Out and "Choose specific shares". When choosing specific shares, the selection of tax lot was left entirely to the user and only 4 lots could be used in a given sale. You would also need to know how many shares you intended to sell before selection.
As of today, I don't see any language restricting the number of tax lots. My own holdings have a max of 8 lots and I was able to select from all of them. The number of shares to sell can now be changed on the fly from the share selection screen. And unless I had previously failed to notice, there are buttons for filtering the tax lots and selecting shares more conveniently. "Auto select" facilitates FIFO, LIFO, Largest unrealized gain ($), Largest unrealized loss ($), Highest unit cost, and Lowest unit cost; as well as facilitating selection by holding period (short term, long term, or both).
While a knowledgeable user could previously work around the interface manually, I consider the new tools to be helpful, especially allowing more than 4 tax lots to be used in one sale.
Statistics: Posted by bene1 — Tue Sep 03, 2024 11:08 am — Replies 0 — Views 76