Tracking shares of mutual during rebalancing

Omega84

How do you enter an exchange buy or exchange sale of mutual fund in quicken? My advisor recently rebalance my portfolio by exchange one mutual fund for another and I would like too enter it in quicken.

Jim_Harman

Quicken does not have an "Exchange" action. If this is normal rebalancing and not an acquisition or share class conversion, you should record it as Sold of one fund and Bought of the other, using up the cash from the sale. 

Frankx

Hi @ Omega84,

Typically, mutual fund "rebalancing" means that you sold one (or more) mutual fund and bought another.  If that is the case here, this transaction (or transactions) should be reported as the sale of a fund and the purchase of another fund.  In Quicken it is a "Sell -Shares Sold" transaction and separate a "Buy - Shares Bought" transaction.

Let me know if you have any followup questions.

Frankx

Tom Young

If the rebalancing was accomplished by the advisor by actually SELLING one security and BUYING another security, then those are exactly the actions you take in your Quicken file.  You mimic exactly what your advisor did.  If the "sale" transaction was for less than all of the security sold you should determine exactly what lots were sold by the advisor and select those same lots in your Quicken file.  If the "buy" was done in a series of separate purchases at different prices then you'd do likewise in your Quicken file.  (This assumes the transactions took place in an after-tax account and you want to track that account precisely in Quicken.)

If the rebalancing was done use tax-free exchanges of one fund for another fund, i.e., if the transactions would not create taxable gain or loss in an after-tax account, then you'd use either the "Corporate Acquisition (stock for stock)" or "Mutual Fund Conversion" action to mimic your advisor's transactions.  (The Mutual Fund Conversion action seems to have problems if you're using "average cost" for the shares, so make a backup - which you should do in any case - before entering your transactions.)