Remember when you started shifting your investments from a Traditional IRA to a Roth IRS, or converted from one to another.
You probably did not monitor your Traditional losses that closely. One because they were paid for with before tax dollars and two, you never paid that much attention to what your advisor put you into.
But now you paid taxes on those Roth dollars, granted you probably are not watching those returns any more closely than your Traditional. But your losses in poorly performing Roth IRAs aren’t deductible by account owners on a Schedule D.
That’s because the investments are owned by the Roth and not the holder of the account. So like gains and losses inside the Roth are ignored for tax purposes.
Ultimately you might be able to claim losses after cashing in all of your Roth IRAs. Granted this includes closing all Roths in which you have gains as well as those with losses. Then if the total recovered is less than your tax basis in the accounts, then the loss can be treated as a miscellaneous itemized deduction subject to the 2%-of-AGI offset.
Assuming that you are allowed to deduct after tax reform, not to mention the records showing the history of the funds.