Cost basis not correct

Question

I own a private equity stock which I entered manually the shares and cost paid.  Each month I enter the value increase or decrease as a "miscellaneous" income as cash.  Quicken calculates the Cost Basis each month as the total value rather than the original cost I paid.  My cost has never been more than what my original cost I paid and the total value has more than tripled over time.  Why is the income being considered Cost Basis?

q_lurker · Answer

As @ps56k suggested, you need to provide more explicit information.  I might guess that you are treating this as a single security in a single account with the account holding both cash and the private equity stock.  You are then recording the income distributions as cash in the account through MiscInc transactions.  You are then looking at the account's cost basis rather than the security's cost basis.  The cash in your account accumulated from the MiscInc transactions you recorded has a cost basis value to it just as the stock has its own basis.  The basis for the cash would be the same as the dollar value of the cash.  You would be wanting to look at the basis of the security separate from the basis of the cash received from the security.

But that is all speculation on my part as to what you MIGHT be doing.  Please clarify both what you are doing, what information you are looking at, and what information you are seeing.

Ps56k2 · Answer

Confused - Are you receiving actual payouts, or is the value merely changing....For my manual tracking of an equity asset, I setup an account, with a "virtual security" which I also manually create in the Security List  - and then I just manually add to the Price History to reflect the ups/downs of the market value.  Any actual deposits, withdrawals, payouts, fees, etc are recorded in the Register as appropriate.