How do I transfer stocks between accounts?

jcritch

I have followed the instructions in Help and yes the Cost Basis is ok but the Amount Invested is doubled because it dumps every entry from Account 1 into Account 2. Any suggestions? I have also tried Remove Shares/Add Shares and Sell Shares/Buy Shares - they all give bad results! - Totally frustrated, John

Jim_Harman

Are you referring to the total "Amount invested" for the two accounts?

I have found that Quicken's "Amount invested" is only useful as a component of other performance calculations. It does not decrease when you sell securities, and it does not include the value of reinvested dividends. It is not supposed to be the same as the cost basis 

jcritch

Hi Jim,
Thanks for looking into this for me, I am at my wits end.
No I am referring to the Amount Invested for the particular security.
In my Portfolio View if I add the Amount Reinvested to the Amount Invested I get the Cost Basis for a security.
(Not sure why it doesn’t use Amount Income which I think would be better for tax purposes but I am not worrying about that.)
I have several instances where a company has decided to switch Transfer Agents which causes this problem.
The program duplicates all the transactions in both accounts when I use the Transfer Shares function so everything gets added together in the Portfolio View and it says that I have invested twice as much in that security.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
John

Jim_Harman

What should be happening when you transfer shares is that for each security you should see one Removed transaction for all the shares in the old account, leaving zero shares there, and an Added transaction for each tax lot of the security in the new account.

Are you seeing something different?

Also if everything is moved "in kind", with no buying or selling involved, you should be able to deactivate downloads for the old account, rename the account, and activate downloads for the new account.

In either case you should delete or not accept any downloaded transactions related to the transfer.

Boatnmaniac

@jcritch - I just tested a transfer shares command for over 100 securities from one brokerage account into another.  It worked perfectly and I see no duplication of holdings, value or amount invested in the new account in Portfolio View nor in Security Detail nor in any of the applicable investment reports.

In addition to the transfer shares process did you also download from the broker into the new account?  That would definitely cause duplicate investments data.  In this case, you would need to delete the duplicate shares downloaded (not the transferred shares) to resolve the issue.

Or, if you want to keep the downloaded data from the broker in the new account, go back to the most recent backup file you have from before you did the transfer shares and do Remove Shares transactions for each security in your old account.

q_lurker

In my Portfolio View if I add the Amount Reinvested to the Amount Invested I get the Cost Basis for a security.

No, you don't get Cost Basis.  You get a value which for select conditions might equal Cost basis, but that is coincidental.  

(Not sure why it doesn’t use Amount Income which I think would be better for tax purposes but I am not worrying about that.)

?? Amount Income?  Better for tax purposes how? Use where? 

The program duplicates all the transactions in both accounts when I use the Transfer Shares function so everything gets added together in the Portfolio View and it says that I have invested twice as much in that security.

The program does not duplicate the transactions.  Note @Jim_Harman 's response.  

Your issue is not how to transfer shares.  You appear to be doing that correctly.  Your issue seems to be misunderstanding what Amount Invested is.  Amount Invested is NOT cost basis.  

Suppose you buy $1,000 of Apple.  A year later you sell that holding for $1,200.  You had an Amount Invested of $1,000 and got a return of $200.  Six month later you buy another $1,000 of Apple.  You later sell half that holding for $750.  Your remaining shares continue to appreciate to $900.  Quicken is telling you that across all time you invested $2,000 in Apple. Your proceeds from the sales are $1,200 and $750 for a total of $1,950.  Your current holdings are worth $900.  Your $2,000 Amount Invested has produced for you $2,850 in value.  Amount Invested is NOT a measure limited to current holdings.

Now the catch is that Quicken does not identify that a transfer is a transfer.  It gets recorded as a Remove and an Add.  For Amount Invested purposes, that new Add is a new.investment.  

That definition/application of Amount Invested has been a major bug-a-boo for a lot of users for many years.  I have seen no effort to alter it.  What they did add (also many years ago) was Average Annual Return which does not rely on Amount Invested and is a much more accurate and versatile performance measure..      

jcritch

No shares were actually sold or bought in this transfer transaction so that is not a issue. What is the issue is that the actual amount invested is not displayed . The shares are not duplicated and display the correct number. However the amount invested is duplicated and therefore increased. They do not use this inflated number to calculate the ACB (amount invested + amount reinvested) so somewhere down in the bowls of the program they know the correct number so why not display it?
Why have a column for amount invested if you are going to screw it up with the transfer function? It is just bad accounting!