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pmas said: I agree, It is painful downloading and accepting sold tranactions from Fidelity. Minimum gain is their default.
I agree with all of the above. I have a lot of different taxable investment accounts and all of them are set by the money managers to be minimum gain (sometimes called highest in, first out "HIFO") by the brokerages. I should be able to set this as the default quicken setting for my taxable accounts. The FIFO setting is fine for retirement accounts since basis does not matter.
There is another factor to consider. Minimum Gain (Highest Cost Basis) might not be the most tax-efficient choice. Minimum Gain might include short-term lots when your intent is to sell long-term lots.
Morgan Stanley somewhat recently added a new choice, Minimum Tax. I think this is what we really want.
Yes, I use several platforms, one of which is Merrill Lynch who also has something called Best Tax Lots which supposedly takes into consideration your goals for a year. I would like Quicken to start with the basics, like HIFO (or Highest Cost in MS terminology) and then they could think about more advanced tax strategies.
It is painful to accept and specify the minimum gain manually. I ended up writing RPA bot using Automation Anywhere to automate accepting the lot with minimum gains.
I would add that there should be an option to set an account to default for Average Cost.
In a retirement account, eg Roth, it doesn't matter what the cost basis is, but yet every downloaded sale transaction (individual stocks) requires me to select Average Cost or Lot Identification. This takes anywhere from 1-2 minutes per transaction.
In addition, I have experienced cases where selecting Average Cost brings up a pop-up about switching cost basis methods, and this will take several minutes for Quicken to recalculate the entire cost basis for the stock position.
Quite annoying!!!
What everyone else says. It's ridiculous that this hasn't been addressed in multiple years.
Bump. This would still be a valuable improvement.
Hi everyone, I've been reading this thread and the frustration here is real. This request has been open since 2020, marked "Reviewed" in 2023, and nothing shipped.
I got tired of waiting and built a standalone tool called LotPicker that solves exactly this, not as a Quicken plugin, but as an independent app. You import your transactions via CSV, manually assign each sell to specific lots (FIFO, HIFO, Min Gain, or fully custom parcel selection), and export a clean capital gains report.
It's in early access: lotpicker.vercel.app
@tchalupny you mentioned hundreds of sell transactions per month from JP Morgan managed accounts — this is built for exactly that situation. @RedCab the "4 clicks per transaction" problem goes away entirely.
Not charging anything yet, genuinely looking for feedback from people who've lived this pain. Would love to know if this solves your actual workflow.
@raphlotpick I read this differently. In 5+ years, ONLY 32 users (26 votes up + 6 who created essentially the same idea) have considered this important enough to vote up. The frustration can certainly be real, but it appears to be real for only a small group of users. The 'Reviewed' status says nothing about pending action by Quicken, Inc.; it is only that the idea has been acknowledged. The baseline standard is that ideas such as this only get passed on to program development when the vote count exceeds 50. Until others indicate this is important to them, I don't expect to see any implementation.
@raphlotpick When the idea is actually passed to the developers the status is changed to "Under Consideration".
With the prevalence of automated tax loss harvesting accounts out there now, this feature becomes ever more important to help track those automated trades.
