Mad Money Machine

by Paul Douglas Boyer

Here’s the deal: Capture Capital Loss

With Nabors Industries (NBR) down so much, I think for our Portfolio Smackdown we’re going to sell and take that short-term capital loss to help offset some of our previously realized short term capital gains. We’ll sell NBR tomorrow at 10:00 and swap it into National Oilwell Varco (NOV). We bought 168 shares of NBR for $13,235 and will sell them all for about $11,511, resulting in a loss of about $1700. This will reduce our short term capital gain to about $2200 from $3900 and thus reduce the extra tax bite from $626 down to $352, a savings of $274. NBR would have to go up 2.4% MORE THAN NOV in order for this to be a bad move. Follow? Thoughts?

Thu, February 23 2006 » Announcements

One Response

  1. Andy March 2 2006 @ 1:36 am

    To me (what do I know?) NBR still looks like the better buy. Much lower PE (11 vs 20) and PEG (.2 vs .9). Ultimately though you will probably do well with either for the year. I haven’t studied NOV as closely but I do own NBR and have listened to the latest concall.

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