Fidelity pumps the breaks on tax-aware long/short. Does this impact you?
Requesting off the record comments from impacted advisers
Two-day taxable wealth conference
Week of Jan 12, 2026: Sponsor prospectus released
Seattle, WA - May 2026
In 2026, Tax Alpha Insider will ship 4 times per week
Sunday (paid)
Tuesday (paid)
Thursday (paid)
Friday (free)
The 4th post of the week knows it is Friday.
It will be a brief and silly recap.
What I’m reading
☝️☝️☝️☝️ I’m working on a piece about this now… how is this impacting your practice? Private comments for this story are off the record, so please be honest.
Jeopardy (TV): Contestants don’t know what an ETF is
The Tax Adviser: Hedging Market Risks: Accounting for Notional Principal Contracts
The Tax Adviser: A walk through the step-transaction doctrine
Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets, and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for The Simpsons
What I’ve recently covered
☝️☝️☝️☝️ lots of interest from advisers, managers, and analysts. Let me know if you would like to participate. Basis Northwest will have a dedicated space for a/the working group. I will send an update on the working group next week.
☝️☝️☝️☝️ expect an update on this over the weekend. I’m speaking with many sources.
Astrology for men
Do you understand this meme?
For years, I didn’t.
I’m referring to the template: gray, yellow, pink blobs.
Who are these characters? What does the yellow ball represent? Is the gray character tossing the yellow ball or trying to catch it? Is the big pink character malevolent? Should I just Google all of these things? If a meme requires googling… does it achieve its goal? Which is… what exactly?
This is how I imagine a comedy writer’s brain works. I wouldn’t know since I’m not a comedy writer. I am a tax analyst.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the source of all of these memes is AI… lol… that’s absolutely false. What’s actually happening is that I’m studying some topic and my brain is sweating. I’m doing all of the normal procrastination things, like eating snacks, cleaning, etc., which means I’m doing something hard.
And I use memes as an explanatory device. If I can explain a concept via meme, I feel like I’m mostly succeeding.
Looking at the meme above, you don’t really have to know anything about substance over form to understand it’s raining on the gray dude’s tax scheming parade.
Here’s another.
This one is far more esoteric. I don’t think many people will know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the 25/50 diversification tests for a §351 transfer, if you’re curious. Call it an in-joke, which is generally a bad comedy writing practice.
There’s a common theme here, though.
Substance over form really… [readers should fill in the blank]
…ties the (tax) room together.
I’ll have more to say about this in my upcoming paper on §351 transfers to ETF, which should be on SSRN in early February.