Selling off previous years' investments & rollover thoughts

[adamu]

I started NISA in 2015, so this is the first time I have to think about rolling over.

In 2015, I bought a combination of Japanese and US ETFs. But recently, I prefer investing in Japanese mutual funds for multiple reasons:

• You can designate the purchase amount to the invidivdual yen, so use your whole NISA allowance
• They handle reinvestment of dividends
• No trading fees
• No US withholding tax (for the US ETFs)
• A single trading point each day, so less susceptible than ETFs to having their price altered by speculation on the individual fund, rather than the underlying value.

The value of the 2015 investments is not more than 1.2M yen, so there's no benefit of rolling over. I was thinking of using this chance to sell off these old ETFs at the end of the year, and then use the money to repurchase my preferred fund with next year's allowance. The reason I want to do this is I get free trades on ETFs in the NISA, but not outside of it. So I want to sell it off before the NISA period expires.

I also bought the same products in 2016. My question is if I sell off the ETFs this year, how can I be sure it will take them from 2015's allowance? What I don't want to happen is it to take them from 2016, which still has a year of tax protection, and then move my unwanted 2015 stock into a taxable account and the end of the year.

I use SBI, so I've also mailed them this question and will update here if when I get a response.

[RetireJapan]

I had this last year: https://www.retirejapan.com/blog/rollin ... a-account/

I seem to remember having a specific page on Rakuten where I could choose what to do with each holding. That *should* avoid selling the wrong year...

[mule96]

If I remember correctly you can only chose investments that er eligible for roll over, so there is no chance of mixing up.
According to the SBI website, the application for roll-over of 2015 investments into 2020 starts on the 7th December.

[adamu]

I'm not talking about using the rollover feature, I'm talking about if I just sell off some investments, how do I know which year they'll be deducted from?

Anyway, I got a reply from SBI:

当社では、「NISA預り」区分でお預りしている株式はシステム上の仕様「先入れ先出し」方法とさせていただいております。
保有されている複数単位株式の一部を売却されました場合は、お預りの古いものから順に引き出されます。

株式の購入年を指定してご売却いただくことはできませんが、ご提示のケースでは「2015年」に購入された株数が減ります。

So, first in, first out. Meaning the oldest shares, in this case 2015, will get sold off first. Which is what I was hoping for.

They also said that you cannot specify which year to sell, it will always use the oldest one.

[mule96]

Sorry for the miss understanding. But thanks fornthe i formation - good to know!

[Jansen]

I got curious and did a bit of googling, this seems to be a problem with the way the regulations are written and not anything the brokerages can change. I couldn't find a link to the regulation in particular but several sites have referenced a 先入先出法, First In First Out Law.
From SBI's FAQ.

https://faq.sbisec.co.jp/faq_detail.htm ... 289&page=1

Q: 年を跨いで積み立てたファンドを一部売却する場合、購入した年を選択することはできますか？

A: できません。
NISAの制度上、先入れ先出しにより一部売却分は一番古い年度の購入分から売却するため、購入した年を選択して売却することはできません