The Rational Reminder Podcast · Thursday, October 1, 2026
Victor Haghani discussed leveraged long-short direct indexing, a tax-loss harvesting strategy. He expressed skepticism about its value unless there is a belief in generating alpha, citing high fees and complexity. Haghani suggested that for most investors, simpler strategies like owning ETFs and performing tax-loss harvesting on them may yield similar results with less risk and complexity.
“If you don't believe... that the long shorts are going to generate alpha. we don't really think is worth doing. The fees are much higher than in the unleveraged version because here you have higher fees from the manager and you also have a long-short friction that Fidelity or Schwab or whoever the custodian is charging to run the longs and shorts.”
“And, You're getting a lot of deferral just naturally. But if for any reason you do other kinds of investing, you're going to be able to do it. maybe in hedge funds or other things, and you get realizations. You have a lot of capital gains, you might want to try to reduce your payment of them over time and defer those gains into the future.”
“But in general, for most people and for young people in particular, we don't think it's really worth the squeeze.”