TLH
iShares 10-20 Year Treasury Bond ETF
stock NYSE ETF

I have Claude connected to my taxable brokerage account. I have 90+ positions , and each position has dozens on Tax Lots. Schwab doesn't have a simple way to download the tax lots for all positions. So I have Claude connected which will hourly download all my tax lots for all positions. Then it suggests Tax Loss Harvesting opportunities in realtime. I don't have the confidence to have it trade automatically yet. This has been so useful and works great! I'm now developing an efficient capital extraction tool in conjunction to the TLH tool.

a few more notes - there are three aspects to TLH savings - one is tax arbitrage, by using $3,000 in tax deductions annually, I save about 33% or $1K in taxes every year. But in stepped-down basis I would owe 15% LTCG of that $3,000, so just $450.
The second aspect is tax deferral - I will have to pay additional tax on the stepped-down basis, but in my case it won't happen for probably 20 years or so. So I effectively "borrow" $1K from IRS every year, I pay back only $450 for each year, but 20 years from now, while every $1K adds up and compounds over 20 years, you can do the math.
The third aspect is just savings on not paying LTCG on any equities I have to liquidate (or having any drag from dividends, even if you don't sell), since losses are greater than gains. There is no tax arbitrage here, its' the same 15% either way, but by not paying taxes now, and paying them 20 years into the future, the compounding effect of these savings is quite dramatic.
If someone plans to only hold onto the account for a year or two and liquidate the whole thing, the tax deferral (compounding) is obviously minimal, and it's mostly tax arbitrage then (save $ on income taxes, pay them later on capital gains at a much lower rate).

can be worth it, but you an also find places with lower fees. I have about $177K in contributions in Direct Indexing account with Wealthfront, and harvested over $40K in losses since 2020, despite the account doubling over this time (strong bull market). This allowed me to liquidate some holdings and rebalance and not owe anything in LTCG, plus I am using $3K on tax deductions while rolling over the rest for the future use. Wealthfront charges 0.25% for standard DI account, but they also now offer S&P DI account where the fee is just 0.09% - I use that as well, and probably would have gone with just that one, for lower fee, if I had to do it all over again.
Between federal and state, I am in 33% marginal bracket, so I "saved" about $13K in taxes - worth the total of \~$2K in fees I paid since 2020.
It's not true that TLH is "tiny" or "only lasts a year" - in my case it's 7th year and still going strong, even though I stopped contributing over a year ago. Eventually, if you don't contribute new lots and if the market stays strong bull like it has been for the past 4+ years, the TLH opportunities will start drying up, so it's best for people who keep contributing to their accounts annually. This year I had about $1K of harvested losses in each of the standard DI and S&P DI, even though S&P one is just $30K - mostly because it's more recent, and has lower overall gains.

I definitely use TLH as a way to lower my taxable income.
I’m primarily a buy and hold investor. Occasionally, I’ll sell a position that trigger capital gains. I can wipe them out by selling some PYPL or NKE. Of course I wish that I didn’t buy them in the first place. They can’t all be winners like NVDA or LLY.
In addition to selling enough to wipe out the gains, for the last several years, I have reported a $3k loss. I think I currently have about $10k in losses that I have carried forward from previous years.

> if it’s down I would sell vti for an equivalent fund (ITOT) 30 days before tax day and let that sit in there until my taxes are filed and then sell that fund back for VTI
Not quite, on several fronts.
Really doesn't have anything to do with tax day. And you want to avoid two funds that are "substantially identical" tracking the same index. A good TLH companion to VTI would be VOO, since they are highly-correlated *separate* indexes.
On any given day you could sell VTI for a loss, *and immediately buy into VOO*, and you've effectively bought into "the same thing" (close enough) at a lower cost basis while banking a loss.
The thing is it's not magic. It's more like shuffling your tax burden around rather than eliminating it (unless you happy to be in a 0% LTCG bracket, in which case you can do some good stuff). By buying back in at a lower cost basis, it means there will be more gains at some point down the road when you sell that new position.
But it can be very handy in rebalancing taxable portfolios, if nothing else.
It also really helps to have regular influx of new $$ to work out long term. Otherwise if you just buy in with a pile of money and don't add to it, over a long enough time period all of those positions will likely be gains.

Using TLH capital losses to offset long term capital gains is inefficient.

I like the idea of Direct Indexing US Large Cap using a FidFolio account and getting the Tax Loss Harvesting benefits. However I can see the downsides here. Should I ever cancel I will be stuck with owning hundreds of individual stocks. It also seems that TLH gets less and less effective with time (I still don't fully understand this but that seems to be what some people think at least).
What are your thoughts on these accounts? Is it worth the higher fee compared to just going with a general S&P 5 00 ETF or Mutual Fund and not doing any TLH?