Starting from zero · Course 11 of 11 · Stage 2
What the tax code takes
The mechanics that change how a return reads: holding periods, basis, wash sales, corporate actions and turnover. Not tax advice, and rules differ by country.
This course is not tax advice, and it cannot be. Tax rules differ by country, by state, by account type and by circumstance, and they change. Nothing here tells anyone what to do, and no figure here is a rate that applies to any reader. Every worked example labels its rates as assumed.
What the course does is narrower and useful: it teaches the mechanics that change how a return reads. An investor who does not know what basis is cannot read a return of capital distribution. One who does not know what a wash sale disallows cannot read their own trading record. One who has never done the compounding arithmetic will underestimate what turnover costs, by a lot.
Six lessons. Holding periods and the line between them. Why two dividends from the same kind of company are not treated alike. What basis is and the three things that change it. What a wash sale does to a loss and to the replacement holding. What a corporate action does, and which filing tells you. And the arithmetic of paying tax every year against deferring it.
Where a real case is used it is a real filing with its accession number. Where a rate is used it is assumed and said to be assumed. Anything that looked like planning advice was cut rather than softened.
The tools, not the work
What the tax code takes is 6 lessons on the arithmetic and the rules an investor has to be able to handle: the discounting, the probability, the standards, the tax. They are what you work WITH. None of them is work done on a company you own, and a tool understood is not a book checked.
Related
- Costs and taxes, before you start is the short version of why a return has to be read after costs, and the lesson to start from.
- The average that lies is the compounding arithmetic the last lesson of this course applies tax to.
- Company catalogue is the company catalogue, where the filings a corporate action is announced in can be found.
See our methodology for how the product reads a filing and what it refuses to compute.