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Fixing stock lots messing everything up

daveinma

I noticed that my investment lots in Quicken didn't match what my broker reports, so I attempted to create a 'phantom' transaction where I removed the shares from one lot and then added shares to the correct lot. e.g. Quicken says I had 100 shares from August 2013 and 50 shares from August 2015 - in reality I have 150 in August 2015 and ZERO in 2013. So I removed the 2013 shares, but instead of zeroing out, it INCREASED the shares listed for 2013. Of course, the addition of shares for 2015 worked as expected. so I deleted the adds/removes and it went back to the starting point.

I then attempted to do it the 'hard way' and manually fix each and every actual transaction to take from the correct lot, but that didn't work either.

my TOTAL shares are correct - it's just the cost basis that's wrong. I'm 90% there to just ignoring it, but I like my reports to be correct.

I've already tried the rebuilding investing lots repair, but that hasn't done anything.

anything I'm missing here?

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Accepted answers

Jim_Harman

Are you sure there are no hidden Placeholders that are affecting your holdings? Go to Edit > Preferences > Investment transactions and make sure Show hidden transactions is selected.

All comments

NotACPA

What's happening here is that when you've sold shares of each of those securities, you didn't specify to your broker WHICH tax lots to sell from. SO, your brokerage almost certainly used FIFO.

NOW, by "moving shares between lots", you're potentially falsifying tax info (Long vs. Short term gains) AND your really screwing up your investment returns (since that depends upon when you bought and sold shares of the security).

What you should probably do is confirm the use of FIFO with your brokerage and then go back to each Sale transaction and change it to use FIFO.

daveinma

It’s actually the opposite- I specified which lots to sell with my broker. It’s only in quicken that either I entered it incorrectly or I’m hitting some weird issue when I tried to fix it.

q_lurker

If you’re having something weird (unspecific) happen, I would start with the most recent sale, unspecify lots, and work backwards in time. When back far enough, reverse course now making the correct lot specifications.

daveinma

so I did as q_lurker suggested, but I think I've described my problem inaccurately. when I collapse a given stock lot grouping, I get the correct # of shares - let's say 100. when I expand the stock grouping to see the individual lots, I see 3 entries with dates for shares that do NOT ACTUALLY EXIST. in fact, if I were to add up each lot entry, it totals up to MORE than the 100 shares - by more than double. this is so weird that at one point, I had zero shares - the lots reflected zero. I then bought some in August 2015 and suddenly a share lot from 2014 showed up. move back a day in the holdings, it disappears. go back to the 2015 purchase date, the 2014 lots appears. weird, right?

Jim_Harman

Are you sure there are no hidden Placeholders that are affecting your holdings? Go to Edit > Preferences > Investment transactions and make sure Show hidden transactions is selected.

daveinma

I did find a hidden transaction, so that cleared up 1 problem. then when I did as q_lurker suggested, it all worked out! thanks so much! so very very weird - I got penalized for keeping detailed track of sales by lot. once I switched it to FIFO, it all worked out in the end!

q_lurker

daveinma said:

I did find a hidden transaction, so that cleared up 1 problem. then when I did as q_lurker suggested, it all worked out! thanks so much! so very very weird - I got penalized for keeping detailed track of sales by lot. once I switched it to FIFO, it all worked out in the end!

Penalized? Certainly some type of glitch can cause the problem you cited, but my suggestion was not to force you back to FIFO for everything. I use lot specification for almost all my accounts, with very little problem. Where this type of issue has cropped up, I have never been able to track it specifically to the use of lot specification. But I have found backtracking to make sure lots were correct somehow managed to correct the underlying issue.

Because I want my Quicken data to reflect tax data as much as possible, I need and use lot specification. Being mindful and diligent, it works fine.

daveinma

Well I'm sure I could go back and assign the correct lots but these are for 4 year old transactions, so there's not much point now. In any event, my basis is now correct for the shares I own and my lot assignments are correct for the last couple of years.