How is Tax Efficiency calculated (the Tax Profile panel)?
The Tax Profile (Est.) panel in the Strategy View's Return Statistics shows how tax-friendly a strategy's trading actually is - how many of its realized gains qualified for long-term capital-gains treatment versus being taxed as short-term gains at ordinary income rates.
Rather than guessing from turnover, we run a realization-based simulation of what a real account would have done:
- Each month's target weight changes are converted into actual sales (when a position's drifted value exceeds the next month's target) and buys (when it's lower).
- Every sale's realized gain is computed as sold value minus cost basis, using the average-cost basis method across that ticker's accumulated shares.
- Each realized gain is classified by holding age: short-term if held under 12 months, long-term if 12 months or more.
- At the end of the selected window, any remaining positions are bucketed as if liquidated that day, classified by their current age.
The panel reports, for the date range you've selected:
- ST trades / LT trades - counts of short- and long-term realizations
- ST / LT avg hold - average holding period in months for each bucket
- ST / LT gross gain - total realized gains in each bucket
- LT Gains % - the headline number: the share of all realized gains that were long-term
A higher LT Gains % means more of the strategy's gains get the favorable long-term rate. This percentage is also what the Taxable Account toggle uses to blend your short-term and long-term tax rates when estimating after-tax returns - so the two features share one consistent model.
Two limitations to be aware of:
- The panel needs at least 12 months of allocation data in the selected range to classify gains; with less it shows "Not enough data" rather than a misleading number.
- Blended (custom) portfolios are analyzed from their net ETF weights. When two sleeves trade the same ticker in opposite directions, those offsetting trades net out and may be under-counted, so blended results are a slight approximation.