Tax question about short term losses vs long term gains
 

If I want to tax harvest my investment account (short term losses) how much can I deduct from long term gains?

In other words if i want to sell long term winners can I offset that against short term losers?

I read somewhere about only being able to deduct 3k against income but that doesn't seem like much - how do day traders handle their taxes?

Must a be a nightmare.

Any help or insight appreciated.

You can cancel them
 

You can offset long-term gains with short-term losses.

Ideally, of course, you'd prefer to use your short-term losses to offset short-term gains, because short-term gains are taxed at a higher rate. However, sometimes you don't have any short-term gains.

http://taxes.yahoo.com/guide/begin/gainplan.html

For daytraders, the accounting is pretty easy. Everything is short-term, and so you can measure

+ Account Value Dec 31
- Account Value Jan 01
- Capital Contributions during year

and get the total gains, all of which are short-term.

I believe the IRS permits you to simply report the gain as income and skip the details of the trades you made. Caveat: I am not a daytrader.