transfer short option between accounts

Unknown

I transferred an IRA from one brokerage to another.  One of the securities transferred was shorted call option on a stock.  I ended up with a placeholder transaction in the receiving account, and the option is still showing up as a holding in the account the option was transferred from.  Try as I might, I can not get the holdings in the 2 accounts to show the proper number of shares and get rid of the placeholder transaction.  I'm using Quicken for Windows 2016 Deluxe.

Tom Young

You can't just "Remove" the position in the old Account and "Add" the position in the new Account?  Have you tried that?  If you have, what happens?

q_lurker

You are right that the Shares Transferred function will not move short positions (I presume that is where a "shorted call option" stands in Quicken).  Further I do not think "Add Shares" to create a short position (you cannot insert a negative sign in the Shares field).  

I suspect your path is the re-create the shorted call in the receiving account and cover it in the sending account.  

(Note this is not an area I have experience with.)

Tom Young

You can do an "Add" in the old Account to remove the position, that seems to work fine.

You can do a "Remove" in the new Account to get the position established there - number of shares short - but not the cost basis.  I tried a RtrnCap on that position and Quicken didn't like that. 

Seems like you have to sell short again in the new Account to get that position established, followed by an "Xout"  for the cash with the offset to the same Account.

q_lurker

Tom Young said:

You can do an "Add" in the old Account to remove the position, that seems to work fine.

You can do a "Remove" in the new Account to get the position established there - number of shares short - but not the cost basis.  I tried a RtrnCap on that position and Quicken didn't like that. 

Seems like you have to sell short again in the new Account to get that position established, followed by an "Xout"  for the cash with the offset to the same Account.

So I did some testing ... 

If the short position (negative share) results from a Remove or Sell transaction, then the Add Shares will properly close that short position.

If the short position results from a ShtSell transaction, the Add Shares does not fully close the short position.  Quicken will report (portfolio views or similar) that there are 0 shares, but if you expand the listing, you will find there is a negative lot position and a positive lot position netting to zero shares.  IMO, that can lead to errors of to-be-determined significance.  

My inclination is such an instance created by the ShtSell (mind you, short positions are not normal for me) would be to:

• Use a CvrSht to close the position in the old account, which will also decrease cash perhaps to a negative value.
• Transfer Cash (or MM for an IRA account) from the new account to the old account thereby balancing the cash in the old account to $0 (or where it should be) but also creating a negative balance in the new account.
• Use a ShtSell in the new account to create the short position there and also to bring the cash back up to $0 in that account.  If there is reason, date the ShtSell back to when it really was established in the first account.  

Those are my uninformed thoughts.

Unknown

q.lurker is correct in his observations.  Covering the short in the sending account does give the correct balance in that account.  However, when I attempt to re-create the short in the receiving account, I get the message "You are attempting to record a transaction on the same date as a placeholder transaction.  Your share balance will not be affected.  Are you sure?"  This was surprising because I looked at the trade history of the option before attempting to re-create the short position in the receiving account and there was no placeholder transaction shown.  If I click "yes" and then go to the trade history, sure enough, there is a placeholder there, same date. I tried deleting the short sale in the receiving account, and when I looked again at the transaction history for that option, the placeholder transaction was gone as well.  I then tried closing and re-opening Quicken, but got the same behavior. I already had a "cover short" position in the receiving account for when the short expired worthless, so I tried deleting that.  Now the account holdings for the short position in the receiving account was shown correctly (as zero).  I then tried again to re-create the short position in the receiving account, and got the same behavior regarding the placeholder transaction appearing. Argh!  I then deleted the short sale in the receiving account, an re-entered it as a transaction on the next day.  That worked.  I was then able to re-enter the cover short transaction when the short expired worthless, and it's all good.  I'm seriously considering disabling the "create placeholder transaction" option.  It seems to create more problems than it's worth.