Dan Malone

It's a crazy policy.

It needs to be removed.

One of the fundamental principles of capital gains taxation is that you don't tax unrealized non-real gains.

You only tax real gains.

And the problem is as well, you know, with deemed disposal, if you do have a large paper gain and if you have done well as a long term investor over eight years, you might not have the cash on hand to cover the tax bill.

Exactly.

So you might be forced to sell some of your shares, which creates an opportunity cost in and of itself, because as you've now less shares, if the market keeps going up, you've lost the potential gains on those shares.

Exactly, exactly.

It's completely counterintuitive to the principles of long term investing.

And I think we have a very, very serious pension crisis and aging population crisis in this country.

Our state pension system is really under pressure.

People are way far behind on where they should be on their long term financial planning.

I'm one of them.

The least of the government's concerns is collecting a bit of tax on ETFs.

Now is the time to be encouraging people to invest by getting rid of arduous kind of policies like this and making it more user friendly.

And also things like the new savings and investment scheme.

All of that is great, provided it's done correctly.

But at a minimum, just get rid of the demon's disposal.

The starting point really is the annual tax documents that all investing platforms provide.

So at the end of the year, the investing platform will show you where your positions are at.