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Earlier this month I made[ ](https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1rjgwsz/accidently_sold_all_of_my_shares_of_stock/)[my most popular post ever by far](https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1rjgwsz/accidently_sold_all_of_my_shares_of_stock/) where we all had a good laugh at me for being a dumbass and accidentally selling all of my stock. As we all know, since then the market has been on a downturn. There's probably over a hundred comments (I just got a couple as I'm typing this!) on that post saying something like "wow you must've profited from this mistake, right?" And I wanted to go over the details to say, no, not really. At least, not in a way that matters:
For reference, what I bought and sold was FXAIX, which is just Fidelity’s S&P 500:
I sold 204.659 shares at $239.44 per share for a total of $49,003.55 at market close on March 2. I said “last night,” on the original post which is when it closed, but I had actually placed the sell order earlier in the week and didn’t realize until it went through that day.
I bought 171.429 shares at $232.29 per share for a total of $39,821.24 at market close on March 12. That left me with about $9,182 uninvested. I used $5,000 for house repairs and the rest will sit in a savings account until next year to pay off long-term capital gains.
The difference between my sale price and rebuy price was only $7.15 per share, which worked out to about $1,463 in avoided losses on the shares I originally sold. $1.4k is a lot of money to "save" from a dumb mistake (even if I bought way less than I sold), but I really don't feel like a winner. Definitely not worth the stress of now needing to owe almost four grand in extra taxes next year. Even if I had managed to wait and buy at $228.34 today with the same amount of shares that still only would’ve been $11.10 per share, or $2,272, a little over half of what I now owe in fucking taxes.
No lesson here other than goddamn I'm such a dumbass lol and also don’t try to time the market. Keep yo money in. The dip can keep dipping, but who knows? Probably not you or me. I also want to say no one ripped me too hard or anything which I appreciate, and a lot of you actually gave some good advice. No tax expert has any time to meet with me until after tax season, but I have one on the schedule next month to explore my options. I'll probably just need to pay off the long-term gains, but live and learn I guess.