Scaled Estimates of Mutual Fund NAVs

[Red S]

With the recent market volatility, you may be tax loss harvesting or buying or selling mutual funds. If so, read on:

Problem: Mutual fund NAVs (at least in the US) are updated exactly once per day, at the end of the day. When needing to make financial decisions when the trading window is still open (eg: when tax loss harvesting), and the end-of-day NAV is not yet available, it is sometimes useful to make a trivial estimate of that NAV, especially on days when there are huge changes in the market.

This may be trivial to write a tool for for a single fund, but when one’s portfolio has 10 or 20 funds or more, I find a tool critical to quickly making trading decisions (eg: tax loss harvesting).

See my article: Scaled Estimates of Mutual Fund NAVs, which explains the problem and presents a new, small tool I wrote for this, "scaled-navs", that ships with fava_investor.