Stock Sale Not Appearing in Portfolio

R Strax

I sold Stock A on 6/11/21. This appears in "transactions". I then purchased Stock B on 6/14. The "portfolio" view still shows Stock A and B in my current portfolio as of 7/5/21. The portfolio view does not acknowledge the sale of stock A. I don't see any way to manually remove this stock from my portfolio.

To summarize - "transactions" shows the stock sale and proceeds credited to my balance, but "portfolio" still shows the stock in my current portfolio. The "price and holdings as of" date is correct. I can't manually remove the sold stock from the portfolio view.

What do I do next?
Thanks!

jacobs

Quicken adds placeholder transactions any time it needs to adjust and account balance or share holdings to match what's being reported by a financial institution (which can sometimes be incorrect temporarily), or when it doesn't know the cost basis.

jacobs

I'll answer your question with several more questions, which will help us get to the bottom of the situation...

Are you entering your transactions manually or downloading from your brokerage?

Is the Sell transaction showing the number of shares sold and value of the sale correctly? That is, if you sold 100 shares at $10, does it show
   Total Sale $1,000.00
   Number of Shares 100
   Price per Share $10.00 

On the Portfolio view, filtered for Portfolio Value, Group by Security, how many sales of Stock A does it show? The original amount? A tiny remainder? What is the Market Value shown for Stock A?

If you set the As Of date to June 30, does the Market Value in Quicken agree or disagree with the market value on your brokerage statement as of June 30? 

R Strax

I am still having this problem. "Transactions" shows sale on 6/11/21 of 55 shares LIT @ 70.044364, amount $3852.44. The math is correct.

As of today, 10/30/21,"Portfolio" continues to show that I own 55 shares of LIT worth $5055.05. And guess what? My account is $5055.05 over the amount shown at my brokerage.

The math and entries are correct - Quicken is wrong - and the folks there have given me no way to make a manual correction or reconcile with my downloaded brokerage info. 

I'm really frustrated with lack of any support from Quicken. This issue has been going on for a long time. My finances are pretty important to me and I don't like this at all. Now that I'm a subscriber I expect better service.

R Strax

Buggy Quicken. I played with this and found the problem. For reasons unknown, Quicken had added a "ghost" reconcile transaction of 55 share purchase LIT in 2015. No such transaction ever happened. That's why the portfolio kept showing an incorrect number of shares. Is this Quicken trying to "fix" accounts by adding things without my input? Ugh.

jacobs

Quicken adds placeholder transactions any time it needs to adjust and account balance or share holdings to match what's being reported by a financial institution (which can sometimes be incorrect temporarily), or when it doesn't know the cost basis.

Jon

I had the same thing happen to me a few times over the years, most recently this week. I sold shares of Fund A and bought shares of Fund B in one of my IRA accounts. After placing the orders, I manually entered the sale & purchase transactions in Quicken. A couple days later when the transactions posted to my account Quicken added a placeholder transaction to add back the shares of Fund A.

It only took me a minute or two to figure out what was going on, but I had recently spent some time merging several old Quicken files into my main file so finding & fixing incorrect balances was fresh in my mind. I think what makes things like this so puzzling is a combination of two things. First, when Quicken decides to add one of these placeholder transactions to fix what it perceives as a mistake, it does so silently without notifying the user. And second, it backdates that placeholder transaction to the beginning of the account. In my case, that was almost 5 years ago. Since I had last reconciled the account at the end of September, I would expect the source of the discrepancy to be in the last month, not January 2017.

I think a couple of changes to Quicken would help address this. First, tell the user when there's an error requiring a placeholder fix, so at least they have an idea something is wrong. In my experience, the placeholder transaction is frequently not the correct fix (as in this case) and the user has to do some work to figure out what's really wrong. Second, instead of backdating the placeholder transaction to the beginning of the account, backdate it to the most recently reconciled transaction - make the assumption that everything was correct up to that point. That puts the placeholder transaction where the user is likely to see it & in the range of dates where they are going to be looking for a problem.

R Strax

Jon said:

I think a couple of changes to Quicken would help address this. First, tell the user when there's an error requiring a placeholder fix, so at least they have an idea something is wrong. In my experience, the placeholder transaction is frequently not the correct fix (as in this case) and the user has to do some work to figure out what's really wrong. Second, instead of backdating the placeholder transaction to the beginning of the account, backdate it to the most recently reconciled transaction - make the assumption that everything was correct up to that point. That puts the placeholder transaction where the user is likely to see it & in the range of dates where they are going to be looking for a problem.

I agree wholeheartedly. I thought Quicken posted a notification when it put in a placeholder. That's what I remember from the past. Maybe with all the recent changes they have dropped this essential feature, trying to make "corrections" in the background. Mistake. Please Quicken, let me make those decisions.