Investment Sold transactions are in reports as realized gain

Bert Onstott

I have a lot of stock sales in investment accounts that have a category of realized gain in reports. When I edit the transaction, there is no category shown, as would be appropriate I think. How can I fix this?

Boatnmaniac

Hi @Bert Onstott .  Which report are you referring to?  If it is the Investment Income or a spending report (such as, Itemized Categories ) then "Realized Gain/Loss" is correct because these reports just look at whether or not the security sale was a gain or a loss.  They do not report the breakdowns between cap gains/losses because those reports do not have a tax focus.

To get the cap gains/losses data which will breakout that data into short-term and long-term, you need to open the reports that have a tax focus, such as, the Capital Gains report or, if you have Premier or Home & Business, the Schedule D report.  You will also see the Cap Gains broken out properly in Tax Planner.

You will not see the sale transaction details having categories listed in the transactions.  Quicken calculates them based upon the tax code.

Bert Onstott

It's in an Income and Expense by category report. After looking into this, it seems that sell transactions in investment accounts (these accounts are IRA accounts), should not have categories assigned.

But when I use search and replace to find all the transactions with a category of _Rlzdgain, it brings up a lot (>1000) of sell transactions with that category.

Is that by design, or did the download of these transactions from my brokerage put that category in by mistake?

I guess I can exclude realized gains from the report and that would solve the problem. But is it correct?

Bert Onstott

Oh, and I don't think it's correct to think of a stock sale as a realized gain. It's only a gain if the sale price for the shares was higher than the purchase price, right?

Bert Onstott

And it seems there is no option to exclude realized gains from the report.

Bert Onstott

I guess we might as well close this. I changed the report to include all categories instead of selected categories and it stopped reporting any realized gains. Then I changed it back and it still doesn't report any realized gains. So very strange. But problem solved.

Boatnmaniac

I'm glad you got it figured out and working for you. 

Regarding your "Realized Gain" comments:

• As mentioned earlier, it is a calculated category that Quicken applies to securities sales, regardless of whether it was a gain or a loss.
  
• While the category is called "Realized Gain" you will note the description of it is "Realized Gain/Loss".  It might be better if the category name was changed to "Realized Gain/Loss" but "Realized Gain" is legitimate because a realized loss is really just a negative realized gain.  It's kind like going shopping and spending $100.  It would show up as an expense with a negative number in the report under "Shopping."  Then if you return it for a refund you would enter the refund in the register as a positive "Shopping" expense.  Regardless of whether or not it is a positive or negative number, they are expense category transactions.
  
• Realized Gain is a real category because it represents real income or real loss.  But I don't include this category in my income/expense reports because it tends to give me a false picture from a budgeting and cash flow perspective since I don't rely on those realized gains for my daily income requirements (most of my investments are IRAs, too).  But if that investment income is going to be used to meet my living expenses then I think it would be perfectly legitimate to include it in the reports.
• In the Income/Expense reports Realized Gain is a hidden category.  I'm guessing that at one time you had checked the box for hidden categories to be shown and then the box for Realized Gain was checked.  When you later selected all categories I am guessing that show hidden categories box was not checked so the Realized Gain category then got unchecked.  Just a guess but it would be a logical explanation.