Today I’m doing something that I hope I don’t end up doing too often. I’m recommending that you buy a stock I’ve been selling recently. And it’s stock pick that has cost me a lot of money as I chased it down thinking GE shares can’t go any lower. And then they fell. And fell. And fell.

First of all, let me tell you why I’m selling – to harvest some losses to offset gains I’ve made in other trades this year. It’s a pure tax play, and I suspect I’m not the only one who’s going to be selling GE this fall to offset capital gains from other parts of their portfolio. That could keep the stock price down or even drive it to more attractive valuation levels.

To be fare, this isn’t a play for impatient investors. My thesis is that GE is undervalued given its breakup plan, which should leave stockholders with a large stake in a newly independent medical device firm and a revamped GE focused on power (including renewable energy) and aviation.

But spinning off a standalone health care company is expected to take 12 to 18 months. The company says it may take two to three years to extricate itself from its stake in Baker Hughes. Substantial debt reduction is also part of GE’s restructuring plan.

It’s an ambitious agenda that will take time. In the meantime, GE currently pays a dividend of 3.7%, and CEO John Flannery told investors they plan to maintain the dividend at the current level until the Health Care spin off is completed.

At that point, investors will have an interesting choice. Maintain stakes in both GE and the new health care company, or divest of one and pick the other. It’s too soon to know which company will have the stronger long term prospects, but I think investors who get in at today’s stock price will enjoy a decent dividend payment for a year or two until the health care divestiture is complete. Then they will have the prospect of finding themselves with stakes in two companies that look more attractive than today’s stock price for GE would suggest.

In a recent report, Morningstar called GE shares oversold, despite laying blame for the company’s recent woes on ill-advised “financial engineering” and a “poor record of capital allocation” undertaken by previous CEOs.

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