Topic: How To Invest

Hi Pat, When you sell a U.S. stock, how is the loss or gain taxed?

Article Excerpt

When you sell a U.S. stock, you calculate capital gains, and pay taxes on those gains, just as you do when you sell a Canadian stock. There are two extra calculations you’ll need to make, however. You’ll need to take the purchase price in U.S. dollars and convert it to Canadian dollars using the exchange rate on the day of purchase. Then you take the sale price and convert it to Canadian dollars using the exchange rate on the day of sale. You then calculate the gain or loss based on those two Canadian-dollar amounts. You can get the conversion rates at the Bank of Canada web site: http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/exchform.html The difference in the exchange rates between the two dollars can have a bigger impact than any change in the U.S.-dollar value of your investment. The U.S. dollar has dropped by about a third from early 2002 until now, and this has weighed heavily on taxable capital gains on U.S. stocks held…