update to Broker account - why did Quicken say I'd be recording a "short tranasaction"?

David Kosterlitz

I never do short sales and have never seen this message before. I accepted the transaction anyway. Why did it say this and what does it mean?

Tom Young

A short sell is when you borrow securities that you don't own and sell them, hoping to buy the borrowed shares back later at a lower price than the sale, making a profit.

What what the nature of the transaction you accepted?  Maybe a "Removed" action?  If you look at the Holding's window in the Account are you seeing any security with a "Shares" number that's negative?

What's needed here is more detail behind the transaction, and maybe the transactions leading up to it.

NotACPA

Specifically, the transaction IN THAT SECURITY that led up to the "short sale"

David Kosterlitz

Thanks NotA and Tom. After a long tech support call to Quicken today, my problem is resolved. We disabled the two brokerage accounts in Quicken from updates (saving those registers in a hidden form in case needing to find a transaction), then added them again anew and did an update. VOILA, no more erroneous "short sale" transactions. Those resulted from what is technically known as a "glitch." My inquiry can now be closed.

Tom Young

If you created new Accounts in your Quicken file for existing Accounts and then did downloads into the new Accounts, downloads that resulted in your various security holdings in Quicken in agreement with what the broker is reporting, then the new Accounts almost have to have "Placeholders" in them, placeholders that lack cost basis information.  The only exception to this would be if the downloaded history covered the entire time the accounts have been open at the broker.

Somehow that approach seems somewhat extreme to me but without knowing what you and Support went through trying to fix things in the original Account, I can't really say.