Buying and Selling The Same Stock

Malthusian

Ozzuk wrote: »

if you aren't trading in an ISA then you should be declaring it (not forgetting you can offset losses).

Not going by the information in the OP. You only have to report gains if you have gains in excess of your annual capital gains allowance (currently £11,100), or have made disposals of 4 x the capital gains allowance (£44,400). The OP has only made a gain of £2,200 and disposals of £13,200 so at the moment he doesn't have to tell HMRC or include it on his tax return.

alternate

Assuming OP is not insider trading and declaring his profit to the tax man - the worst they can do is audit you. Unlikely and annoying but if you have done nothing wrong then only an inconvenience.

Ozzuk

Malthusian wrote: »

Not going by the information in the OP. You only have to report gains if you have gains in excess of your annual capital gains allowance (currently £11,100), or have made disposals of 4 x the capital gains allowance (£44,400). The OP has only made a gain of £2,200 and disposals of £13,200 so at the moment he doesn't have to tell HMRC or include it on his tax return.

Every day is a school day, I thought any profit had to be declared as income on a tax return, didn't realise it was linked to CGT. It's why I always trade in my ISA, perhaps I should have researched this more!

Birdman2015

The shares I am dealing in are for a US based company so I was led to believe I wouldn't be subject to UK tax?

Malthusian

Led to believe by whom?

If you are a UK taxpayer, gains on US shares are taxable in exactly the same way as UK shares.

vsyrine

I suggest that you just invest on a strong company and invest long term, what your doing is you actually trade or market timing, there is no wrong about it. but we cannot always know when it is time to buy or time to sell. but if you invest on a strong company listed for several years of decade even if the prize goes down you don't need to worry but be happy because it is time to buy and invest more because sooner or later the prize of that stocks will goes up.

Birdman2015

Malthusian wrote: »

Led to believe by whom?

If you are a UK taxpayer, gains on US shares are taxable in exactly the same way as UK shares.

OK, thanks for the clarification. It was a colleague at work that told me that.

Malthusian

I might be inclined to tell him to check the tax rules before he ends up in hot water with HMRC. Or someone else does. Evading tax is one thing but to tell other people that something is tax-free when it isn't is not nice.

But if he is also only trading the kind of sums we've been talking about, then his error won't do him any harm.

economic

vsyrine wrote: »

I suggest that you just invest on a strong company and invest long term, what your doing is you actually trade or market timing, there is no wrong about it. but we cannot always know when it is time to buy or time to sell. but if you invest on a strong company listed for several years of decade even if the prize goes down you don't need to worry but be happy because it is time to buy and invest more because sooner or later the prize of that stocks will goes up.

didnt quite work out that way for tescos, morrisons and sainsburys....

bowlhead99

economic wrote: »

vsyrine wrote: »

but if you invest on a strong company listed for several years of decade even if the prize goes down you don't need to worry but be happy because it is time to buy and invest more because sooner or later the prize of that stocks will goes up.

didnt quite work out that way for tescos, morrisons and sainsburys....

How do you know it didn't? His contention is that you don't need to worry that the prices went down, be happy that it is time to by and invest more because sooner or later the price will go up. With those supermarkets, OK, it didn't happen sooner, but perhaps it will happen later. We haven't had much over five years of it going down yet, and supermarkets are not dead in the water.

So if you bought Tesco at 450p and 300p, you might have liked to buy it as well at 150p in the middle of last week, or 137p in January, and waited for some "sooner or later" change of fortunes (today it was a little over 160p).

In fact if you had fluked the timing you could have bought at 137p in the first week of Jan this year and exited after less than three months at 202p, some 47% up. No reason to expect that level won't be hit again (unless we Brexit and all bets are off for a while).

So while Tesco obviously looks like a bad call over the last 5 years compared to other things you could do with your money, the loss after dividends is less than 50% and there have been a couple of decent "bounces" in last couple of years. Some people will still say that "sooner or later the price goes up".

Not a recommendation of course and I agree there's no certainty - shares wouldn't ever be affordable if they were guaranteed sure things year in year out. Maybe better examples for you to use than the supermarket trinity would have been Woolworths, HMV, Blockbuster. Buying near the end of one of those businesses - they went under rather than went back up. With the supermarkets, the jury's still out on the future shape of grocery retail and who can get it right.