Fannie Mae (FNMA)

[contrarian bull]

You mean off setting your gains, correct?
I have too but a little off the front and any gains.

I used those losses against my salary and a lot of capital gains.

Not to get too far off topic - but this would apply to f&f gains and losses too.

In one year due to having to exercise a bunch of expiring CSCO stock options that had split 1:2 or 2:3 5 or 6 times. I had a huge capital gain. I do not normally worry about taxes when investing, but that year I was kind of fed up about how much I had already paid the IRS so did an exercise and hold - using margin against those shares to pay the taxes. Those gains were big because with all the splits my option price was around $1.00. Bad move - when CSCO dropped from $80 to $8 I had a long series of margin calls forcing me to sell shares well below my exercise price. Those losses offset my salary and other stock profits for several years until I had worked off those deferred tax losses. I remember the morning of 9/11 I was at the Dulles FedEx office sending off a check to cover a margin call, hoping the next plane was not headed my way...

f&f are doing the same - you see those DTA's drop each quarter but they still have a lot. Would be a bummer to have the tax rate drop while you had all those carried losses.