Stock Price Issue

James Young

Q is pulling incorrect stock price data on several of my stock holdings. The Current year quotes for these stocks is correct but in prior years it is pulling vastly different stock prices for lengthy periods of time. For instance Alphabet price range has been between $50-$150 over the past 5 years however in Q this price has varied between $1,500 - $3,000. As you can imagine this greatly skews my data in prior years. This is also happening with Amazon Stock price. I know I can change stock prices at a point in time but how do I do this for a period ranging over multiple years?

Jon

Amazon and Alphabet stocks both split 20:1 last summer, so you're probably seeing pre-split stock prices. Online stock price charts typically hide stock splits by adjusting the pre-split prices downward by the split ratio, so the pricing history in Quicken looks vastly different than what you see in those charts but you don't want to mess with it. Since you also have 20x the number of shares you used to have before the split, Quicken needs to keep track of what the prices actually were back then so the history of your portfolio value will be correct.

If the problem is that you're seeing massive 20x jumps in the value of your Amazon & Alphabet holdings last summer, make sure the stock split transactions got entered correctly in your register. Amazon's stock split became effective on June 6 and Alphabet's on July 18th; you should see Stock Split transactions entered in your register on the previous business day for each of those (June 3 and July 15, respectively).

James Young

Thank you Jon. So that makes sense. Here is the issue now, In the past Morgan Stanley has uploaded splits but not in this case so I didn't see any splits In the Q detail. As I mentioned, since some of the lots had not recorded cost basis, I thought by adding these it might correct the issues. When I pulled the MS tax lots (I have attached), it lists the shares purchased and unit cost basis apparently adjusted for the latter year split. In other words for the purchase in 9/16 it lists the shares at 100 and the unit cost at $39.6. In reality then at the time it was actually only a purchase of 5 shares at a unit cost of $792. So I went in an added all of these lots with the split adjusted amounts. As I look at the price history in Q (attached) , it does show the approximate share price in the high $700 range at that time, however now on 9/16 it shows the $39.6 price. My question now, is there a way to manually correct this? My thought is I would enter the pre spit share and price amounts for each tax lot then add the stock split in 2022? will this clear up the issue without breaking something else?

Jon

James Young said:

My thought is I would enter the pre spit share and price amounts for each tax lot then add the stock split in 2022? will this clear up the issue without breaking something else?

That is what I would suggest you do. Each transaction in Quicken should show what happened at that time - the actual number of shares purchased and the actual price paid - as if you had been entering the transaction on that day with no knowledge of the stock split that was coming.

James Young

Jon, It worked perfectly! Thanks so much for the assistance!