AT&T price history errors from Fidelity

vzts4q

Starting at around the time of the Warner Brothers Discovery spinoff from AT&T there are problems with the price history when updating. There are dates where the is a price is off by $5.00 more or less. This results in a graph that does not represent the true value. I assume this is a problem with Fidelity. Is there a way to find out if Fidelity is aware of this and get it fixed?

vzts4q

Here are screen shots showing the issue. All the errors always have a zero opening price.

lhossus

I see the same problem in the price history for AT&T shares which I hold at Morgan Stanley.

The problem is with Quicken. Let me explain.

1) The prices the Quicken program stores in its Price History table are, for each trading date, the price per share for a share as traded on that date. Simple, right?

2) But, Quicken also downloads the price per share history regularly from a security pricing service such as Yahoo and updates the internal Price History table. Per Quicken's support article at How to Update Security Prices: 

• Quicken downloads daily prices of the selected securities for the most recent month, weekly prices for the 11 months prior to that, and monthly prices thereafter.

(disclaimer: the evidence I see in the Price History agrees with this description of daily, weekly and monthly. But since the support article is addressing a slightly different process, it may not be entirely accurate.)

3) Now, the situation suddenly turns ugly:

The security pricing service is providing data designed for a different application: primarily, user's of the data want to see the price fluctuation of a currently held share over time, without regard to splits, reverse splits, and spin-offs. That is what you get when looking at graphs of price history on the web. So the pricing service goes thru the price history and re-calculates historical prices to reflect the price of today's share on those earlier dates. When a share changes to represent more or less of the underlying investment due to split or spinoff, the price per share changes in proportion.

In the case of a spin-off such as Warner Brothers Discovery from AT&T each share of AT&T represents less value because that missing value went with the spin-off. Thus, the historical price per share is adjusted accordingly.

When the Quicken program imports this adjusted price history into its internal table that contains unadjusted prices, but only imports the Friday prices, and Month End prices, you get a mess. Some prices are for shares as they were at the time, and some prices adjusted to represent a share today after splits and spin-offs.