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Generally any holding you have for more than a year is ‘long term.’ Each purchase is considered a separate ‘tax lot’ and will be treated and taxed based on the date of purchase and sale. Your trading platform should allow you to see tax lots and even select which ones you sell from to manage taxes.
For example I’ve held amazon for a while. I had two tax lots at about $1650. One was long term and another was shot term from this past March. Both had nearly the same return, but I could sell from the older tax lot to get the lower tax rate on the gains.
Pro
All your profit from anything you held and sold for less than 12 months is calculated as regular income because they are considered short term gains. After 12 months is long term gains, which would probably be taxed at 15%. So generally speaking, it’s beneficial when you hold for longer than 12 months, but oftentimes it makes sense to exit a position earlier.
Also, it’s FIFO, which is first in first out. So if you bought one share of TSLA fifteen months ago, and then another share five months ago, and then sold one of the shares tomorrow, you’d automatically be selling the share you bought 15 months ago for a long term gain.