What types of etf's or mutual funds might have unexpected complications in how they are taxed, besides the usual cap gain and dividend distributions? My goal is to avoid things likely to need special handling or particularly late assessment or reassesment of taxable returns. I had to help a relative with consequences of a partnership, and the yearly process seemed worse than having my eyeballs slowly pulled out with corkscrews.
One possible example is the bullion etf's. I hear GLD and maybe SLV should be treated under higher "collectables" tax rates rather than cap gain, but maybe not ticker CEF.
Another is DBC which includes gold/oil commodity (futures?). An article warned this is treated funny in tax due to being structured like a partnership. Would DBA (agric.) be the same, or is it back to a bullion issue?
What about closed end funds in general? At one point I heard they sometimes do that trick where some gains are considered return of original investment or some such thing that was excruciating to handle in partnership-land (usually released ridiculously close to tax deadline).
Thank you for treating this in a preliminary, brainstorming way, and not wasting platitudes about consulting lawyers or prospectus. A 100% wrong answer is better than no answer because it may include clues to followup on. A 80% wrong guess would be wonderful with that juicy 20% to start building on. Prissy and defensive correctness has destroyed prospectus's, which used to be frank and specific but now are meaningless lists of open ended boilerplate caveats. Let's respect folks to properly manage epistemology - they know to what degree they know and what they don't know, regardless of whether good or bad advice is thrown at them.