Say this is your year. One stock you own is up $30,000. Another is down $20,000. You sell the one that fell and keep the one that rose. You are still ahead by $10,000. Your tax return shows a $20,000 loss, and that loss can lower your tax bill.

The move is called tax-loss harvesting. In a regular taxable brokerage account, you can do it yourself.

The version with a $3,000 cap. The loss first cancels profits from other investments you sold this year. There is no dollar limit on that part. If losses are bigger than those profits, only $3,000 a year can reduce the tax on your wages. The rest carries forward. That $3,000 cap has not been raised since 1978. Buy the same stock back within 30 days, before or after the sale, and the IRS disallows the loss.

The version Wall Street sells. Over the past three years, investors put more than $150 billion into funds that do this at a much bigger scale. One of the best known is AQR Capital Management's TA Delphi Plus Fund, with about $6.6 billion in assets as of June 30. The funds hold some positions that rise and some that fall. They sell what went down, lock in the tax loss, and leave the winners invested. The investor stays in the market and still gets a loss to report.

Those losses are not stuck at $3,000. In July, Treasury official Kevin Salinger said he had seen pitch decks claiming that $1 million invested might produce a $300,000 ordinary loss. He did not name a firm. Ordinary means the loss can offset salary and bonuses, not just stock profits. He told investors that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is. Bloomberg also reported that AQR's fund booked ordinary losses in 2025 equal to 28% of the money invested.

A normal stock sale does not work like that. A stock loss is a capital loss. It mostly cancels other investment gains. Some of these funds also use swaps and currency bets, where the tax label is not fixed in advance. A win can be booked as a capital gain, which is taxed at a lower rate. A loss can be booked as an ordinary loss, which can reduce the tax on salary.

What the IRS objected to. On Sept. 28, the IRS released Notice 2026-62. Selling your losers is still allowed. The notice says the problem is funds that pick the friendlier tax label after the trading day is over and they already know which trades won. Winners get the lower-tax label. Losers get the label that offsets wages.

What happens next. Nothing is banned. The IRS asked for comments by Oct. 28. It said it may write new rules, and that those rules could apply to tax years people have already filed. It also said it may challenge some of these funds under the law already on the books. AQR has said it changes its strategies to stay inside the rules. It did not comment on this notice.

Zypper's take. Wealthy investors do not just earn more. They can buy a fund designed around the tax code. The version everyone else gets is the small one: sell a loser, use up to $3,000 against your income, and carry the rest forward. It is boring. It is legal. It is still yours to use.

The setup. Zoe De La Paz, 26, was a mechanical designer in Chicago earning about $75,000. This summer she took a seasonal job as a seamstress for Xanterra, which runs Yellowstone's hotels and restaurants, at $19.25 an hour. She lived in an employee dorm, had no car, and was sometimes woken at 3 a.m. by bugling elk, her "nightmare alarm clock."

The numbers. Her July 2026, as she shared with CNBC Make It, came to $2,640 with savings included:

She also had about $11,000 in emergency savings and more than $34,000 in a 401(k) from her old job.

Zypper's take.

The $96 does a lot of heavy lifting. Full time at $19.25, she grossed roughly $3,300 a month, so rent was about 3% of pay. Experian says Gen Z is putting 51.9% of income toward rent. Rent, phone and subscriptions totaled $150, which is how she still saved $586 in a birthday-splurge month.

It's a company town, now with bison. Her employer provided a subsidized bed and meal plan, plus a clinic where a head-cold visit cost her $15. That's a huge hidden subsidy, and the one part of her budget that can't leave the park with her.

The cushion made the leap possible. Walking away from $75,000 is a lot less scary with $11,000 in the bank and a $34,000 401(k) behind you. The move sounds impulsive. The balance sheet says it was funded.

Enjoy it while it lasts. Her contract ran through September, and she's been fielding costume gigs in Los Angeles and New York, with plans to tap savings for the move. Either city is about to send her a very different rent bill.

Per Reuters, Anthropic's confidential IPO prospectus shows 2025 revenue up 12x to about $4.6 billion and a net loss near $42 billion, roughly $34 billion of it a non-cash accounting charge. The Claude maker has also committed $518 billion to computing power, about 80% of it owed whether the capacity gets used or not. Think gym membership, except the gym is a data center. The listing could value it above $2 trillion and will likely come after the November midterms.

Americans keep telling surveys they feel awful about money, then spending like they don't. The Conference Board's consumer confidence index fell 6.7 points to 81.9 in September as fuel prices surged. Meanwhile, inflation-adjusted spending jumped 0.6% in August, the biggest monthly gain since March 2025. Vibes: bad. Receipts: busy.

Mortgage rates rose for a sixth straight week to about 7.3%, nearly a three-year high, and purchase applications fell to their lowest level since April 2025. Then Friday's jobs report showed employers added just 29,000 jobs in September, making an October Fed rate hike look less likely. Bad news for job hunters, maybe a breather for house hunters.

Texts and calls are now the top way scammers reach victims, per a Better Business Bureau review of nearly 440,000 reports. Their toolkit is boringly legit: VoIP numbers, bulk-texting services, website builders, AI voice generators and social media ads. The scam economy basically runs on a startup's software stack. Free fix: turn on your phone's spam filter, and ignore texts about jobs or loans you never applied for.

That's what Americans plan to spend on Halloween costumes for their pets this year, per the National Retail Federation's annual survey. It's more than 60% of the $1.5 billion going to kids' costumes, and the top pet looks are pumpkins, hot dogs and ghosts. Total Halloween spending is forecast at a record $13.5 billion, so the vibes can't be all that bad.

HBO Max + Paramount+ = one app — The Paramount–Warner Bros. merger closes Tuesday under the new name Skydance, and the plan is to fold both streamers into one service with roughly 200 million subscribers. No timeline or price yet, which is the only plot twist that matters.

More Americans are breaking up with the IRS — Treasury's list of people who renounced citizenship or gave up long-held green cards hit 5,790 names over the past four quarters, the most since 2020. The State Department cut the exit fee from $2,350 to $450 in April; the exit tax for people worth $2 million or more did not get the memo.

Santa's supply chain got a discount — The U.S. and China agreed to lower tariffs on about $60 billion of goods, and the U.S. list includes dolls, puzzles, fireworks and bed linens. Rare earths are still a sticking point, so call it a ceasefire for the toy aisle, not the trade war.

Gen Z's "little treat" economy — Gen Z's spending at small and midsize coffee shops is up more than 25% in a year, even as nearly half of 18-to-29-year-olds needed outside help with everyday bills. The lipstick effect now comes with oat milk.

Your dream job opens up in a national park. It pays half your current salary, but housing and meals are basically free for a year.