book your fucking losses

It is that time of the year when you need to book your fucking losses to make some money! YES you read that right. It's March, end of financial year. Once we cross March 31st we need to pay tax on a the short term capital gains made last year. We tend to do a lot of profit booking but we hold on to stocks that are loss making. So we end up paying tax on all the profits generated and we make more losses on our loss making investments by holding on to them. That is double loss!
So book your losses adjust it against the profits and then pay tax only on net profit. Save lot of money and thank me someday :)

Note that you can offset your short term capital gains only with short term capital loss and not with a loss in  a long term investment. But still this is a good time to review those long term loss making investments also and dump them down the drain where they belong ... unless you are in love with the psychopath who has kidnapped your portfolio and is one day going to shoot it down. And unless you are harley quinn "daddy's little monster" I suggest you you look for these little monsters in your portfolio and weed them out .. and reduce your tax outgo by doing the same before 31st March in the next 5 days

Pay your taxes

If you don't declare your capital gains, I strongly suggest start doing it else the taxman is surely coming to your door sometime soon (Aadhar, KYC, digitization and single view dashboard of all records, they can catch you easily if they want to). Modi and Jaitley are one of the smartest politicians and they know people are making money in the stock market and they would want you to contribute some of that back for Nation building (not unfair at all). So unless you are harley quinn and don't give a shit ..start declaring your short term capital gains religiously. Once you start declaring it, you would want to save on it. To save you need to book your fucking losses. And trust me you will gain much more by getting rid of these loss making investments using tax planning as an excuse to convince your heart into taking this difficult decision, than you would lose by paying your capital gains tax. 

So let's do some accounting jugaad because in real life harley quinn is just a dream ! 

practical optimist

The temperament of a investor plays a very important role in his success or failure. Whether he is optimistic or pessimistic influences what he does which in effect decides the result he gets from the market. Let's take the BJP or Modi victory in UP state elections and look at how different investors would react to it.

The Optimists's View
The optimist would see this as a great tailwind for the market which will take it to new highs. He would further say that this actually seals the BJP victory in 2019 and is a long term positive event for several years to come. It would make passage or implementation of major reforms like GST, attack on black money, bad loan cleanup, digitization very easy for the ruling party and keep good news flowing into the market and hence he would suggest that people should invest blindly in this market.

The Pessimist's View 
The pessimist would see this as an expected event that the market has already factored in. Any run up in the market according to him would be a good opportunity to book profits in the market. He would argue that elections and other political events have only short term impact on the market and going forward market would focus on results, monsoon, FED rate hike, EU elections, geopolitics, and the continuing trend of outflow from EM's to DM's

The Practical Optimists's View
A practical optimist would say that look market can do whatever it wants to do. It may go up or it may have factored in the UP victory and will face resistance and profit booking at higher levels or it may be range bound reacting to various global triggers... but it's going to be definitely better than what could have happened had BJP lost the UP elections. No doubt about that! Now that's a Practical Optimists's View that cannot go wrong can it ? better days ahead for sure !

Who am I ? I try to be the practical optimist .. always .. who are you ?