Not all Schwab holdings showing up

Indigo

I reset my Schwab accounts in Quicken Mac to the new system. My checking and savings accounts seem to have transferred OK, but my brokerage account is missing some holdings. They show up in the transactions window, but not in the dashboard or portfolio. I chose the "detailed" option, so it isn't that.

Indigo

Looking at this further, the holdings that are missing don't have a green check mark next to "currently held" in the securities window (Window > Securities). However, nothing has changed since I reset the Schwab account. I still hold those securities. Is there are way to change this manually?

LarryNolan

@indigo My Quicken Mac is same; missing securities in IRA accounts only. Fixed Income mainly.

Quicken Marcus

I'll reach out to you both directly but let me provide some background that might help everyone who reads this post investigate these types of issues.

1) Switching from the old Schwab connection to the new one means we're now getting data from a new Schwab service and this could mean that transactions, holdings, and balances may be presented in subtly different ways. We've been working closely with Schwab and our aggregation partner over the past year to iron out any differences and to make sure Quicken interprets them in the same way but things can be missed so make sure a buy on Schwab is showing up as a buy in Quicken, etc.

2) Some people are reporting duplicate transactions. Every transaction is typically identified by an ID and if your transaction downloads overlap we know not to download a transaction again if we see a matching ID.  However, the IDs are different between the 2 systems so we can't rely on the IDs matching but will look at other items in the transaction such as date and amount to decide whether a transaction is a duplicate. This is made harder with investment transactions because they don't always happen or get reported on the same day and they don't always impact the cash balance. This means Quicken doesn't always guess correctly which can result in duplicate transactions. Look for duplicate transactions which could be changing your holdings. For example. Let's say you have 200 shares of Apple. You sell 100 shares. We accidentally duplicate that transaction so now you have 2 sales of Apple removing 200 shares. This would result in 0 holdings for Apple.

3) We interpret your holdings based on what Schwab reports. There have been issues in the past when there is a lag in reporting.  Let's say you make a purchase or a sale on Friday but it doesn't actually get recorded until Monday or Tuesday which can result in a temporary difference in holdings. For example, if you go to the Schwab website they may record your purchase or sale and it shows up immediately but in Quicken, we may not get the transaction until a few days later.

4) Stock splits are always incorrectly reported by Schwab. In the past, they would classify them as an Add Shares. I know this new system was reporting it differently that would be hard to detect or could impact your holdings but we asked them to go back to Add Shares. I think it's difficult for their systems to report them as a Stock Split. In any case, take a look at any securities you know have gone through a split recently.

5) Placeholder issues. Because Quicken only gets a set number of months of data and doesn't get your entire history, we have to create placeholders that act as a proxy for the shares you purchased prior to the first transactions you have in Quicken.  These are calculated and change every time holding amounts are updated based on downloaded transactions and what Schwab tells us your total holdings for a particular security should be. Sometimes the number of holdings we get from the financial insitution is incorrect or there could be times when our calculations are off because of rounding errors or some other issue that can throw off the holdings count.  The fix is to delete the placeholder.

Anyway, as you can guess there are many things that could potentially throw off your holdings. These are some common reasons or areas to investigate.

LarryNolan

Marcus, thanks for the more detailed explanation. Sent you a private reply.

Indigo

Thanks, Marcus. I also sent you a private reply, but I don't think it is a duplicate transaction or placeholder problem.

Indigo

Actually it was a placeholder problem. Look at the earliest date of your holdings. I had "shares removed"... for some reason. Quicken Marcus helped me diagnose. Thanks, QM!

Quicken Marcus

Indigo and I just exchanged direct messages and it appears the issue was a placeholder problem. I forgot to mention that placeholders always appear at the beginning of an account's history so if you have a lot of transactions they are tough to find.

The way we reconcile holdings within Quicken is to do the following steps.
1) Click on the Columns button in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen.
2) Turn on Symbol, Shares In, Shares Out, and Share Balance columns if they aren't currently turned on.
3) Go to the search box and search for the missing security. The Share balance will tell you how many shares Quicken thinks you have. Make sure it's sorted by date. I would expect it to show 0 shares since it's missing in the portfolio view. This is a good way to reconcile holdings and possibly spot why Quicken thinks a security has 0 shares.
4) Try the other missing securities to see why Quicken thinks there 0 holdings.

This also helps one spot an Add or Remove Share placeholder that could be causing the missing security issue. Deleting the placeholder will fix the problem. We're aware of this as being an issue but we haven't tracked down exactly why this occurs and it really shouldn't happen because the placeholders will only appear if Quicken's holdings don't match the holdings that the brokerage tells us but we know it happens. 

LarryNolan

Too late tonight to check but I think the are some of these ‘placeholders’ in one or more of my problem IRA accounts. Something about shares that meant nothing to me.

Would really like to just go back to a saved Quicken file from 11/6 and reconnect each of the five then update. Any chance that would work? I think I’ve spent enough hours on this mess to ask for this year’s subscription price as compensation IF it all starts working again. Excuse my whining.

LarryNolan

Five days later and am waiting to call Support. My five accounts: three have been disconnected and reconnected, duplicate transactions deleted, placeholder transactions deleted and are updating ok, except I get asked each time to do the reconnection process --why?
Two IRA accounts have gone through the same process but their portfolios each are missing three holdings: 4 CDs from various issuers and two Treasury Notes.

The IRAs are my subject if I am successful in contacting Support today. Followed by the repeating reconnections.

bwilner

Over the last few weeks 8 of my holdings disappeared from one of my Schwab IRA accounts in Quicken. I followed the steps described by Quicken Marcus on 11/17/21. I found that all 8 missing holdings had a "Remove Shares” transaction in the “Type” column (all with a 1/31/16 transaction date) However, after deleting the "Remove Shares” transactions, 7 of the 8 holdings were still missing a substantial number of shares compared to my actual Schwab account. Please help me to resolve these discrepancies.