LeConte Wealth

Call Directions Website

LeConte Wealth Advisory services offered through LeConte Wealth Management, LLC, a Registered Investment Adviser.

10/17/2026

BUILD AROUND · The executive's problem

If a large part of your net worth is stock in the company you work for, you already know that concentration is a problem. What's less obvious is that the usual fix creates a second one.

Sell it and you trigger the gain. Hold it and you stay concentrated. Buy an index fund alongside it and you quietly buy more of your own employer, because it's in there too.

The version where the portfolio is built around what you already own — leaving your employer out, filling in what's missing — requires owning the pieces.

10/16/2026

Leave It Out

Somebody comes in and says: I'll invest in anything except the company I just retired from.

With a fund, the answer is no. The fund holds what it holds.

With individual holdings, the answer is just — fine. Leave it out. Same for a sector you don't want, or a company you have restrictions on, or a position you already hold too much of somewhere else.

HARVEST · The losses inside the indexThe S&P 500 is up 13.1% this year. 205 of the companies inside it are down. Both of...
10/15/2026

HARVEST · The losses inside the index

The S&P 500 is up 13.1% this year. 205 of the companies inside it are down.

Both of those are true at the same time. The index is an average, and averages hide a lot. The typical stock in it is up about 5.6%, less than half the headline.

If you own the fund, you own the average. The declines in those 205 companies happened inside a wrapper you can't reach into.

If you own the companies, the ones sitting below what you paid are usable. That's how a loss gets harvested in a year the market is up, which is the part most people find surprising.

It isn't a trick. It's what happens when you can see the pieces.

10/14/2026

One line, or five hundred

Your statement says one line. Behind it are five hundred companies having five hundred different years.

In 2022 the index fell about 18%. Inside it, some companies were down more than 60% and others finished the year well higher. If you hold the fund, all of that nets into one number and you can act on none of it.

If you hold the companies themselves, every one of them is a separate decision — sell it, keep it, give it away, leave it out entirely.

Same exposure. Very different set of options.

Passive investing. Active ownership. The first half is the part you already know. Index investing has earned its reputat...
10/13/2026

Passive investing. Active ownership.

The first half is the part you already know. Index investing has earned its reputation: low cost, broad, hard to beat. Our stock portfolios follow an index too. We're not trying to outguess the market.

The second half is where the difference is. In a fund you own one line on a statement.

Own the companies themselves, and every holding becomes a decision: harvest a loss, leave a stock out, build around what you already hold, give the right shares away.

This week: what active ownership actually means, one verb at a time.

10/08/2026

Seven questions worth asking before December 31 — of us, or of whoever handles this for you.

1. What is my taxable income going to be this year, not last year?
2. Is there room left in my current bracket, and what would fill it?
3. Have losses been harvested this year — and did anything I own elsewhere undo one?
4. What's my capital loss carryforward, exactly?
5. If I'm giving to charity this year, should it be cash or should it be stock?
6. Is a Roth conversion worth doing, and how big?
7. Who is actually going to run these numbers before the calendar closes — and when?

If the honest answer to the last one is "my advisor will call my CPA in December," that's the hand-off. It's where most of this gets dropped.

We prepare our clients' returns ourselves, which means there's nobody to call. If you'd like to see what that looks like applied to your own situation, we have review time open between now and Thanksgiving.

If you're planning to give to your church or a charity this year, there's a version of that gift that's worth more to th...
10/07/2026

If you're planning to give to your church or a charity this year, there's a version of that gift that's worth more to them and costs you less — and October is when to start it, not December.

Giving appreciated stock directly, instead of selling it and writing a check, means the gain doesn't get realized on the way, the organization receives the full value.

You don't carry the tax on the sale.

And if you own individual stocks rather than one fund, you can choose which shares go — the ones with the largest gains, bought longest ago, the ones you'd least like to sell yourself. That choice isn't available to someone whose account holds a single line item.

The reason to start now: transfers of securities to a charity take time to settle, and a gift that clears in January is a next-year gift. Every fall, somebody finds that out in the last week of December.

10/06/2026

Your investment account is not your tax return.

It's a piece of it. The rest is a spouse's 401(k), stock that vested in the summer, a K-1 that won't show up until spring, fourth-quarter business income that's still being decided, and a Social Security decision sitting underneath all of it.

Any one of those can change what the right move is in December. A review that only opens the statement won't see a single one of them.

A tax form that runs forty pages sounds like a problem. Sometimes it's evidence that something was done right. Harvestin...
10/05/2026

A tax form that runs forty pages sounds like a problem. Sometimes it's evidence that something was done right.

Harvesting losses properly means working holding by holding — taking the loss in the individual stock that's down, even in a year the market as a whole finished up. You can't do that if you own the index as a single line. You can if you own the companies inside it.

It isn't free. It only works in taxable accounts, it usually defers tax rather than erasing it, wash-sale rules limit it, and owning the individual companies means your returns won't track the index exactly — sometimes better, sometimes worse.

And it makes paperwork. Dozens of trades, each with its own cost basis, all reconciled at tax time. Hand that to an outside preparer and it becomes a bigger bill. We reconcile ours, because we're the ones preparing the return.

Tax-loss harvesting applies only to taxable accounts and generally defers rather than eliminates tax. General information, not tax advice — what applies depends on your circumstances.

10/03/2026

When we say we prepare the return, these are the people we mean.

Jon Dockery, CPA and partner. Tanya Wilson, tax team. Their desks sit about forty feet from the people managing the portfolios — which is the whole idea. The year-end conversation happens in a hallway instead of in a voicemail nobody returns until January.

Give them a minute.

Address

333 East Broadway Avenue (4th Floor)
Maryville, TN
37804

Opening Hours

Monday 8am - 5pm
Tuesday 8am - 5pm
Wednesday 8am - 5pm
Thursday 8am - 5pm
Friday 8am - 5pm

Telephone

(865) 379-8200

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when LeConte Wealth posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category