저자: AdamFeather · 외국인
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영상 결론: 마이클 배리는 연말 세금손실 수확(tax loss harvesting)을 위해 손실 중인 종목을 팔았지만, 장기 견해는 유지하며 대체 종목이나 콜옵션으로 자리를 지키고 있다. [배리의 행동] 2024년 10월 초 배리는 가장 큰 보유 종목이던 룰루레몬을 전량 손실 매도했다. 회사에 대한 견해는 바뀌지 않았다고 밝혔고, 약 한 달 뒤 재매수 의사를 밝혔다. 매도 자금은 데커스(Hoka, Ugg 보유사)에 옮겼다. 그는 연말 세금손실 매도 물량이 10월 말~12월 초에 몰려 가격을 누른다고 보고 먼저 움직였다. [배리가 언급한 종목 6개] 룰루레몬, 조에티스, 스프라우츠 파머스 마켓, 피서브, 패니메이, 프레디맥. 모두 그가 좋아하는 종목이지만 시장에서 신저가를 기록했다고 설명했다. 종목마다 처리 방식을 다르게 했다. [다섯 가지 처리 방식] (1) 룰루레몬: 전량 매도 후 데커스 매수, 한 달 뒤 룰루레몬 재매수 예정. (2) 패니메이·프레디맥: 패니메이를 팔고 프레디맥으로 교체, 다음 달 역방향 교환 예정. 워싱턴의 결정을 기다린다고 함. (3) 스프라우츠·조에티스: 손실 규모가 작아 2028~2029년 만기 콜옵션으로 교체, 가치 반등(value revival)을 기대. (4) 피서브: 보유 유지, 평균단가가 나쁘지만 연 10%대 초반 수익률을 기대. (5) 손실이 작을 때는 세금을 무시하고 추가 매수하는 것이 일반 방식이라고 밝힘. [국가별 규칙] 미국: 워시세일 룰로, 매도 전후 30일 내 동일 또는 실질적으로 동일한 증권을 사면 손실이 인정되지 않으며 배우자 매수, 배당 재투자, 옵션 매수도 포함된다. 2008년 IRS 해석상 같은 기간 IRA 내 매수도 워시세일에 해당해 손실이 영구 소멸한다. 연간 3,000달러까지 일반소득에서 공제 가능. 캐나다: 전후 30일 superficial loss 규칙, 배우자·법인·RRSP·TFSA 매수도 포함. 영국: 전 30일이 아닌 후 30일 매수만 대상, ISA 매수는 제외되며 연 2만 파운드 한도 내에서 같은 날 ISA 재매수가 가능. 세무연도는 4월 5일 종료라 영국 시즌은 3월. 호주: 고정 기간 없이 주된 목적이 세금손실 확보인 경우 Part 4A 조세회피 규정 적용, 세무연도는 6월 30일 종료. [세금 효과 예시] 10만 달러에 산 주식을 6만 달러에 팔면 손실 4만 달러. 같은 해 실현 이익 4만 달러와 상계하면 장기 양도세(15%, 고소득 20%+3.8%) 약 6,000~9,520달러가 절감된다. 다만 재매수 가격이 취득원가가 되어 세금은 대부분 이연(deferral)된다. 미국에서는 사망 시 상속인 기준 취득가 재설정으로 영구 면제될 여지가 있다. [실무 점검과 리스크] 과세계좌의 손실 종목을 손실 큰 순으로 정리하고, 최근 30일 내 매수 여부(배우자·모든 계좌 포함), 배당 자동재투자, IRA·RRSP·TFSA 정기매수 설정을 확인하라고 권한다. 영국은 ISA 잔여 한도를 확인하라고 한다. 실패 가능성으로 대체 종목이 엇갈려 움직일 위험, 콜옵션 소멸 위험, 자동 매수에 의한 우발적 위반을 든다. 발언자는 세무·회계 전문가가 아니며 개인 상황에 따라 다르므로 전문가 상담이 필요하다고 명시했다. 영상은 개별 종목 매수·매도 추천이 아니라 세금 제도 설명이 중심이다. [출연자 전망] 배리는 룰루레몬 재매수 의향, 프레디맥·패니메이 규제 결정 대기, 스프라우츠·조에티스 가치주 반등과 피서브의 연 10%대 초반 수익 기대를 밝혔다. 이는 1~3개월 단기 방향 예측이라기보다 중장기 기대에 가깝다. 영상 내 대상 자산 중 배리가 직접 방향을 밝힌 것은 룰루레몬·데커스·패니메이·프레디맥·피서브·조에티스·스프라우츠이며, 그 외 종목은 언급되지 않았다. 손실 확정 목적의 단기 매도 후 재매수 의향이 있어 단기 방향성은 중립에 가깝다.
다듬은 글
If you own a share that has fallen this year, there's a reasonable chance it is worth more to you sold than kept. In the first week of October, Michael Burry, the investor who bet against the American housing market became The Big Short, sold every share he owned in Lululemon. It was by then the largest position in his portfolio and he sold it at a loss.
He hadn't changed his mind about the company. This is a man who keeps one of its old shopping bags framed on the wall of his conference room. The bag is printed with a line from Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, a book about individualists refusing to carry everyone else. He intends to buy the shares back in about a month.
In the meantime, the money sits in Deckers, the company behind Hoka running shoes and Ugg boots. What he wanted was the loss, which now sits on his tax return to be set against gains made elsewhere, while a close relation of the shares he believes in keeps the seat warm. The maneuver is old and entirely legal, but the rules differ from country to country by more than most people would guess.
A purchase that would cost an American his loss outright is one that British tax authority not only permits, but describes in its own manuals. My name's Adam Feather, I'm not an accountant or a tax adviso and I've read Burry's posts closely since he began writing them last year. Most of what he writes is about shares.
This one straight into tax, which happens to be one of the subjects I spend a good deal of my time on. None of this is financial or tax advice. The rules depend on where you live and on your own circumstances and a share that you continue to hold in whatever form can continue to fall in value. But here is what we're going to look at today.
How Burry's maneuver works, the five different ways Burry dealt with his falling shares this autumn and how the rules compare in the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia. You'll also see why a $40,000 loss can be worth as much as nine and a half thousand dollars in tax and you will see which account turns that loss into nothing at all if the shares are bought back in the wrong place.
So, there are eight parts. What Burry did, what a loss is worth, the 30-day rule, Burry's five choices, the rules in four countries, why the saving is usually a deferral rather than a gift, how to look at your own account, and where the whole thing can go disastrously wrong. First, what Michael Burry did.
He opened his post on the 5th of October with a sentence likely to interest very few people outside the accounting profession and a great many inside it. The fourth quarter is tax loss harvesting season, he said. Every year in its last three months, a great many investors look at the shares that have disappointed them and sell because the losses reduce their tax burden.
Being human, they leave it late and do it together and the selling presses down on prices that have already fallen. Michael Burry reckons the pressure begins towards the end of October and is heaviest in the first week of December when much of the selling is done between office parties. He prefers to have finished before the queue forms.
He named six holdings he thought likely to suffer in his particular portfolio. Lululemon, Zoetis, Sprouts Farmers Market, Fiserv, and the two mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He described them all as favorites of his that the market had turned against and every one of them had just made a new low.
What makes the post worth studying or describing today is that he didn't treat them alike. He made a separate decision for each and each decision tells you something about how he values that particular share in question. So, this brings us to part two, what a loss is actually worth. Tax systems, almost without exception, deal in what has happened rather than what might have happened.
A share that has doubled is not taxed until you sell it and a share that has halved is not a loss until you sell it either. Until then, so far as the tax authority is concerned, you have merely been watching numbers move up and down on a screen, an activity it declines either to tax or to relieve. Suppose you paid $100,000 for a holding that is now worth 60,000.
You are $40,000 poorer and the tax authority will take no notice of the fact until you sell. Suppose too that you have sold something else this year at a profit of $40,000. In the United States, if you held it for more than a year, the tax on that gain is usually 15%, which is $6,000. At the highest incomes, the rate is 20% with a further 3.8% on investment income.
That comes to 9,520. Sell the losing holding and the two figures cancel. The gain is extinguished by the loss and the tax on it goes with it. Where there are no gains to set it against, an American can deduct up to $3,000 of net losses a year from ordinary income and carry the remainder forward without limit into later years.
The difficulty is plain enough. You sold for the sake of the tax, not because your opinion of the company changed. And if the price recovers in the weeks that follow, you'll be watching from the pavement. The obvious remedy here, which is to sell and buy straight back, occurred to legislators a long time ago, which brings us to the 30-day rule, part three.
In [snorts] 1921, the United States was barely three years out of the First World War and the federal income tax was still a novelty that most Americans had never paid. Congress had nonetheless already noticed people selling shares at a loss and buying them straight back. It wrote the wash sale rule into that year's revenue act and the rule has stood in one form or another for more than a century.
It disallows a loss if you buy the same shares or anything the law regards as substantially identical, a phrase it has never precisely defined, within 30 days before or 30 days after the sale. The period is 61 days in all, and the 30 days before the sale are the ones people tend to forget. The rule reaches further than most people expect.
An option to buy the same shares counts as a purchase. So, selling the shares and buying call options instead, which are rights to buy the shares later at a fixed price, does not escape it. The IRS takes the view that a purchase by your husband or wife counts as well. So does the automatic reinvestment of the dividend into the same shares, which is how a good many people break the rule without ever placing an order.
In the ordinary case, you keep the disallowed loss for later. It's added to the cost of the shares that you bought back and recovered when you eventually sell those shares. There is one important exception. In 2008, the IRS ruled that if you sell at a loss in an ordinary account and buy the same shares within the window inside your own IRA, it's still a wash sale.
An IRA doesn't keep that record because nothing inside it is taxed, so there is nowhere for the loss to go, and it's simply gone. Of all the ways to get this wrong, it's the most expensive, and it can happen with no intention at all if the IRA buys the same fund every month by standing order, which brings us to Michael Burry's five choices, part four.
He dealt with his six holdings in five different ways. Lululemon was the largest, and for it, he used a substitute. Burry has written at length and with evident affection about Lululemon's talent for injuring itself. In 2013, it recalled a line of yoga trousers for being too sheer, and its founder then suggested the trouble lay with some of the customers' figures.
He's written that bad management is a value investor's best friend. He sold all of his shares and bought Deckers on the reasoning that whatever lifts Lululemon over the coming month is likely also to lift Deckers, too. Both sell expensive clothing and footwear to people who are particular about what they wear, and both are cheap by his measures, though he regards Lululemon as the cheaper.
Deckers also owns Ugg, which the fashion pages have pronounced finished at regular intervals since the 1990s and [clears throat] which still brings in more than $2 billion a year. They are different companies, which means that the wash sale rule does not apply. When the 30 days have passed, he intends to buy Lululemon back and he says he may keep the Deckers as well.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, he handled differently. They are the two great American mortgage companies the government took control of in 2008 when they were close to collapse and has run ever since and he owns both. They have fallen sharply this autumn in the absence of any news at all. He had warned that this might happen and he still professes surprise at how far they have gone.
He sold all his Fannie Mae and put the proceeds into Freddie Mac and he intends to reverse the exchange next month. The decision he is waiting for from Washington could come at any time and he has no wish to be holding neither when it does. Whether the IRS would regard the two as substantially identical is a question that so far as I can find has never been decided.
They are separate companies with separate shares, but they do almost exactly the same work under the same government supervision. Burry has made his own judgment about it. Anybody who copies him is making theirs too. For Sprouts Farmers Market and Zoetis, the animal health company, tax was not the point because his losses were quite small.
Both had made new lows and he replaced the shares with call options expiring in 2028 and 2029 at prices well above where the shares trade right now. It's an inexpensive way of keeping much of the upside if he is right and the options may expire worthless if he isn't. He's expecting what he calls a value revival, meaning a period when cheap unloved shares beat fashionable ones of the kind seen between 2000 and 2003 when unfashionable companies recovered as the technology boom collapsed.
There is a detail here, however, worth noticing. Though the interpretation is mine, rather than Michael Burry's. For Lululemon, where the loss was large, he didn't use Lululemon options, which would have counted as a purchase under the wash sale rule and cost him the loss. He used a different company altogether.
Fiserv, the payments company, he simply held. The loss was not large and he has no suitable substitute. He writes with a frankness that you rarely find among professional investors, that he probably bought it badly. But he thinks the price still offers returns in the low teens a year and the history of his purchase no longer matters.
The fifth course is the one he says he usually takes when the losses are smaller, which is to buy more and to disregard the tax altogether. Even then, he admits, fresh lows give him pause and he often finds that waiting for the shares to settle is the wiser course of action. Which brings us to part five, the rules in four different countries.
Most people watching this don't pay American tax and the main four English-speaking systems handle the matter in noticeably different ways. Canada's equivalent is called the superficial loss rule. Like the American rule, it runs for 30 days either side of the sale and in some respects it is stricter.
It extends to purchases by your spouse or common law partner, by companies you control and by your own RRSP, RRIF or TFSA. A loss denied because of a purchase inside one of those registered accounts cannot be recovered later. The rule doesn't, curiously, extend to your parents or to your children, which must make for some interesting conversations at Christmas.
Britain is the exception and a considerable one. For years, the British habit was to sell a holding near the end of the day and buy it back when the market opened the next morning. The shares spent the night elsewhere and were home in time for breakfast, which is how the practice came to be called bed and breakfasting.
The government ended it in March 1998 with a 30-day rule, but the British rule looks only at purchases in the 30 days after the sale, not before, and it does not apply to a purchase made inside an ISA. HMRC's own capital gains manual says as much. A British investor can therefore sell at a loss in an ordinary account in the morning, buy the identical shares inside an ISA in the same afternoon, within the £20,000 annual allowance, and keep the loss.
The purchase that would cost an American his loss in an IRA is, in a British ISA, entirely in order. A purchase by your spouse falls outside the British rule as well. And Britain keeps its own calendar here. Its tax year ends on the 5th of April, so the British season falls in March, and selling in October achieves nothing that selling in March would not.
Australia has no fixed period at all. The tax office set out its position in a ruling in 2008. "Where the main purpose of a sale is to obtain a tax loss while keeping substantially the same investment, it can use its general rule against tax schemes known as part 4A to cancel the benefit." There is no calendar to consult, only the question of what you intended, which makes the Australian approach less mechanical than the others, and for the same reason, less predictable.
The Australian tax year ends on the 30th of June. Which brings us to part six, a deferral, not a gift. Why the saving is usually a deferral rather than a gift. It's fair to ask whether any of this is respectable. It is. The rules are written into the law, the tax authorities publish guidance on them, and nothing is hidden.
You're choosing when to recognize a loss you've already suffered, which is a good deal less exotic than most of what passes for tax planning. What's said less often, however, is that in most cases, the maneuver postpones tax rather than eliminates it. Return to the example. You paid 100,000, sold at 60, and claimed the loss, then bought the shares back at 60.
Your cost for tax purposes is now 60,000, rather than 100. When the shares recover and you eventually sell, your taxable gain will be $40,000 larger than it would otherwise have been. You have saved $6,000 this year and taken on a correspondingly larger liability later. There is a principle beneath all of this that deserves stating plainly.
A sum of money in your hands today is worth more than the same sum handed over years from now, because in the meantime it can be invested, and because the future has a habit of arriving with surprises. In effect, the government has lent you $6,000 without interest and without a date for repayment. And there are circumstances in which repayment is never demanded.
In the United States, the cost of shares held until death is generally reset for the heirs. If your rate of tax is lower when you finally sell, you pay less. And if by then you live in a country that does not tax capital gains, you may pay nothing. Americans, however, remain taxable wherever they live, and Britain can tax the gains of people who return within 5 years of leaving.
The order in which these things are done is very often the difference between a saving that is postponed and one that is kept, which brings us to the question of your own account, part seven. If you would like to see where you stand, it takes just a few moments with your broker's app. Look only at your ordinary taxable account, because losses inside tax-free accounts have no tax value.
Those are the 401k and IRA in America, the ISA and pension in Britain, and the RRSP and TFSA in Canada. Sort your holdings by loss, the largest first. Then, for each one showing a loss, check whether you have bought any of it in the last 30 days, in any account, including your spouses. Check whether its dividends are set to reinvest automatically, a setting most people chose once years ago and have not looked at since.
And check whether a regular purchase of it is due in your IRA, RRSP, or TFSA. In Britain, the last question is a happier one, whether you have ISA allowances left this tax year, because if you do have, then the loss can be taken and the shares can be kept on the same day. The harder part, if you decide to go further, is choosing a substitute that's truly different, deciding how much of it to buy, and arranging the sales and purchases across more than one account in the right order.
That's the point at which an hour with a tax professional is likely to earn its fee several times over, which brings us to part eight, where all of this can go horribly wrong. Three objections often come up whenever this subject is discussed, and each one deserves a response. The first is that a man of Michael Burry's means has no need to worry about tax.
The answer lies in a remark he made in August when he sold a part of a holding that had nearly doubled. He observed that tax can take between 20% and 50% of a gain, and that investments ought therefore to be compared after tax rather than before. In the same post, he warned against holding a share merely to qualify for the lower tax rate America charges on shares held for more than a year.
Neither observation depends on how rich you are, though it is noticeable how often the rich are the ones making them. The second is that this is a way of dressing up losing positions. There's something in that. Burry concedes that these are favorites that have gone against him, that he bought Fiserv poorly, and that Fannie and Freddie have done very badly on no news whatsoever.
The maneuver does not turn a poor investment into a good one. It means only that the tax authority bears part of the loss. The third is that a long-term investor should leave well alone. For many people, that is correct, and the most profitable thing they will ever do with a brokerage app is close it.
Where the loss is small, the cost of the paperwork and the risk of an accidental breach of tax rules or the 30-day rule can easily outweigh any tax saved. The substitute can also fail you. Deckers could fall while Lululemon recovers, in which case Burry would have kept his tax loss and missed the very recovery that he was trying to preserve.
Companies that usually move together don't always do so, and when they part, it's seldom at a convenient moment. And the long-dated options on Sprouts and Zoetis may expire worthless, in which case everything paid for them is lost anyway. So, Michael Burry has stepped out of his largest position without abandoning it.
The loss is on his tax return, a substitute is holding its place, and in a month or so, he expects to return to the shares he never stopped believing in. The shopping bag, presumably, stays on the wall. Nothing in this requires a portfolio like his. It requires a list of your own losing holdings, an understanding of which accounts the rule reaches where you live, and the patience to count 30 days in both directions. The list can be made tonigh hope that this video was useful to you. .
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