I had an interesting development on Friday. One of the long forgotten stocks in my portfolio (Avis Budget Group) was the subject of a short squeeze and produced a nearly $500k capital gain. I wouldn't rent a car from them, but I'm now proud to be an investor, and when the trade settles on Tuesday an ex-shareholder. (See chart at link.)

Google: Finance Quote CAR:NASDAQ

As some of you know, my policy over my 30+ years of early retirement has been to limit interest and dividend income to the maximum extent possible, while making portfolio withdrawals with capital gains and tax-paid returns of capital. I'm a LTB&H investor who rarely makes a trade and limits investing activity to a couple of hours of tax planning and portfolio rebalancing the last week of the year. Friday's activity was my first stock transaction in eight years.

Of course, there is some cost to this Powerball level win. I've got a large capital gains and 3.8% Medicare surtax to pay and I'll be in the top IRMAA bracket in 2028 paying an extra $600/month in penalties on my Medicare Part B and D premium. But that's fair, there's no reason that middle-class working people should be subsidizing my Medicare insurance.

The lesson here is that even if you have everything on autopilot, it still makes sense to log into your account once or twice a day to detect if you have any large swings in your account value one way or another. Back in 2024, I had a $900,000 ACTS transfer theft that I was able to stop before the money was spirited away to Russia or the Ukraine. And last Friday, a big swing in the positive direction that I was able to act on.

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