Incorrect cash value makes market value of investments incorrect

Unknown

Suddenly, several (but not all) of my investment accounts are showing the incorrect market value because the Cash Balance shown is wrong. In some cases the cash value is essentially zero, but the updated download puts (almost exactly but not quite) the fund(s) value into the Cash Balance box. That makes the market value of the portfolio almost double what it should be. Reloading does not help.

Quicken_Tyka

Hey Ernie,

Sorry you're experiencing this difficulty!

What is the Financial institution that you download from?

What type of investment accounts are these?

Do you have any placeholders in the transaction portion on any of these accounts, if you're unsure please review https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/faq-what-are-placeholder-transactions-in-quicken....

-Quicken Tyka

 

Unknown

Fidelity. I have been downloading this portfolio for a long time (years) and never had this problem before, nor do I have this problem with the other two portfolios I have at Fidelity. 

In the Portfolio -> Portfolio Value view in Quicken, the problem is apparent. All of the Value columns match what my Fidelity account shows. What is wildly wrong is the Cash Balance is off by a factor of 27! That is, the cash value that Quicken is showing is MORE than the current market value of the equities (for example, it should be $1,000 to match Fidelity's cash figure and it is showing $27,000). Further, there are NO placeholders in the Transactions on this account, and all of the transactions look correct in Quicken.

Since I can't see how Quicken is calculating or where it is getting the Cash Value figure, I am stumped as to where to go next. 

Unknown

Problem found. It must have been that I never noticed this over a LONG time, but something was set up incorrectly when the account was created from some other Fidelity account. I just went in and made a balance adjustment and the numbers now look correct. So, my problem lay in having a running incorrect balance column all of the time. I was also looking at the problem backwards. The Portfolio page pulls its info out of the transactions, so if the Balance column (which is really the Cash Balance column) is out of whack, the whole summary is in error. Thanks for your patience. Problem solved.

Unknown

Ooops. Spoke too soon. The totals are all correct, but now the curve on the Portfolio page is 2X what it should be. Any ideas there?

Unknown

wizardchef said:

Ooops. Spoke too soon. The totals are all correct, but now the curve on the Portfolio page is 2X what it should be. Any ideas there?

Getting late here and I am crosseyed. Will get back on this tomorrow and report/post one way or the other. It may be oK. The error got started way back, but once the balance adjustment is made the curve drops to the right point. Tomorrow. (I am thinking best idea is to fix the beginning if possible and not on current date so the curve will be credible).

Unknown

wizardchef said:

Ooops. Spoke too soon. The totals are all correct, but now the curve on the Portfolio page is 2X what it should be. Any ideas there?

This took more hours of sleuthing than I cared to commit to. I traced the problem back to when this account was set up. A couple of years ago I split up a large portfolio into several separate ones. When I established the portfolio in question with a new name, etc., I funded it with a transfer of cash from my large portfolio. That was late 2015. At that time, Fidelity was using 3 different bank cash accounts to handle core cash funds. Somehow I missed the fact that these core bank accounts, which were used to buy and sell traded assets, were never set up correctly (never funded) by Quicken. As time went by Quicken saw the bank accounts as tradable assets. The trades on these bank "assets", which were never seen as funded or bought with the initial cash funds by Quicken, caused errors to accumulate over the last two years. I went in and just deleted these bank transactions and everything is fine. Quicken is apparently handling the interest and cash flow in and out to an unnamed cash account/fund. 

Anyway, maybe this may help someone. Fidelity in the last couple of years changed the way it was handling core cash funds. Quicken seems not to have a problem with the current setup.

smayer97

wizardchef said:

Ooops. Spoke too soon. The totals are all correct, but now the curve on the Portfolio page is 2X what it should be. Any ideas there?

Thanks for sharing.