I sold stock but don’t know when I acquired it. What should I do?

Knowing your holding period enables you to determine whether gain or loss on the sale of the stock is short-term or long-term. Short-term is a holding period of one year or less; long-term is more than one year. Check your brokerage statements for the past year to see whether you bought the stock within the year. Otherwise, you have a long-term holding period. If you sold “qualified small business stock,” you need to have held it for more than five years in order to use a special exclusion for gain. The corporation that issued this stock should be able to tell you when you bought it.