using "shares transfered between accounts" with securities just causes confusion...

Question

I have securities with an offline brokerage company. I have recently transfered all my stocks to Vanguard which allows me to update my account online - Bravo!!  My problem being, when I transfer my shares to Vanguard (16 Stocks with 10- 20 years of transactions) all the postions are listed "shares added" with todays date...

I would like one of two alternatives:
 1)  According to different sources, the old account can co-exist for tax purposes. If this is true I would like to have my transfer in ONE POSITION.
 or
 2) The intial transactions are carried over with the original transactions and dates.

Are either possible?

q_lurker · Answer

And those listed "Shares Added" transactions from the "Shares Transferred between Accounts" process include the cost basis and acquisition dates for each lot of each security you transferred.  Fundamentally, that is all the information you need going forward for future capital gains determinations.  (You could have chosen a prior date for the transfer if that was the specific problem.)

Depending on what long term performance measures you might be looking for, you can usually get the right answer by including both accounts in the customization, so there is no need to have the historical transactions (each buy, sell, dividend, etc. in the new Vanguard account.

1)  Would not normally be a good choice as the breadth of cost basis and acquisition dates would be lost.  But you can certainly manually enter 16 to 20 Shares Added transactions for the 16-20 securities - one cost, one Date Acquired for each.
2)  You found as the moving of transactions.
A third 'special case' option would have been to set up the old account for online access as the Vanguard account.  That only applies if the Vanguard was brand new - no prior transactions.  I doubt that was the case.

Jim_Harman · Answer

It is largely a matter of personal preference, but I prefer the "Shares transferred between accounts" method in this case. It is what most closely matches what happened in real life - your holdings were moved from one account to another.

If you look at the Added transactions that result, you will see that there is one for each current tax lot in the old account. The transaction date matches the date of the transfer and the price paid and date acquired match the cost basis and acquisition date of the tax lot. Your cost basis is transferred intact.

For performance tracking using the Investment Performance Report, all you need to do is include both accounts in the analysis.

Depending on how many transactions were in the old account, you may also see a performance boost, because there will be fewer transactions for Quicken to process in the new account.

Mark1104 · Answer

here is another way to do this....

let the Vanguard transaction download into the existing account you already have for the prior brokerage
then delete the 'add' transactions that Vanguard created.

there may be a little reconciliation to do with the cash as it moves around, but otherwise, now Quicken will keep bumping along with your entire history in one account.

I did it this way and it worked great when it came to assessing performance over time