One of my portfolio accounts is corrupt

OldGuy555

One of my portfolio accounts has lost the cost basis of most of its stocks. I don't want to use a backup because that goes back too far and replaces to much information. How do I repair just the damaged portfolio.

Tom Young

You'll need to investigate this a bit.  Brokerage firms are not necessarily focused on your accounting so it's no uncommon that they push transactions to you that aren't really correct from an accounting perspective. 

Remove actions make securities - number of shares and cost - simply vanish out of your Quicken Account and Added actions "magically" make new securities appear. Sometimes this approach gives you the correct accounting result, (e.g., a tax-free stock for stock acquisition), but not always.  For example, if you knew your "old" stocks basis but the brokerage didn't, (e.g., you transferred shares between brokerage houses and cost basis information wasn't provided by the "from" firm), the Remove action would reduce basis in your Quicken account but the Added action wouldn't add basis; the shares would be carried at a $0 cost.

Figure out what actually happened here, determine what the proper accounting should be, then either accept the brokerage firm's entries of delete them and make the proper accounting entries.

Tom Young

I don't understand how an Account could lose cost basis information unless transactions were deleted or there was some sort of data corruption.

How long ago did this occur?  If it was just in the last few days you should have a backup just before the incident that wouldn't involve a lot of updating.

OldGuy555

Thanks for your quick reply. Upon closer inspection I see that my brokerage made a back-office mistake and removed then added a bunch of stocks. This appears to have the effect of fooling Quicken into thinking there was no cost to the newly added stocks. And so, voila: a mess.

Tom Young

You'll need to investigate this a bit.  Brokerage firms are not necessarily focused on your accounting so it's no uncommon that they push transactions to you that aren't really correct from an accounting perspective. 

Remove actions make securities - number of shares and cost - simply vanish out of your Quicken Account and Added actions "magically" make new securities appear. Sometimes this approach gives you the correct accounting result, (e.g., a tax-free stock for stock acquisition), but not always.  For example, if you knew your "old" stocks basis but the brokerage didn't, (e.g., you transferred shares between brokerage houses and cost basis information wasn't provided by the "from" firm), the Remove action would reduce basis in your Quicken account but the Added action wouldn't add basis; the shares would be carried at a $0 cost.

Figure out what actually happened here, determine what the proper accounting should be, then either accept the brokerage firm's entries of delete them and make the proper accounting entries.

OldGuy555

Thanks for the tip.