Why am I seeing a negative cost basis for an Add Shares transaction?

RDougG

When I add shares to my account, I see a negative cost basis in the Investing view. The transaction and Investing view for this account on the same day are attached. I note that a share transfer from one account to another results in the same cost basis error. I have rebuilt my Quicken file, no change. Any ideas why this might be or how I might go about correcting this?

Mark1104

I suspect the problem is somehow related to the 20:1 stock split that AMZN announced in March, 2022. 

I think what really occured is you purchased 35 shares in 2011 with a purchase price of $223.46.  Correct the add transaction to reflect these numbers which is still the same purchase price of $7821.06.

does that fix it? 

Tom Young

" I have rebuilt my Quicken file"

Not sure what that means.  What you've described here does suggest some sort of file corruption and the typical first step would be to do a Copy of the file and then using the newly copied file, do a Validate & Repair.  Is that what you did?  (Making a Copy first is considered "best practice" as the Copy process in and of itself does sometimes indicate the state of the file.

Do you have any other "Amazon" related transactions in this file?

RDougG

Mark, I deleted my original 'add shares' and per your suggestion 'added' 35 shares at $2223.46. Investing View now shows I have 35 shares, yet the cost basis remains the same as with my prior 'add shares' lot, -1,260,286.40. Odd, eh?

Tom, I did a Validate and Repair on a copy of my file. No change. Over the decades, I have done a fair bit of moving shares around, in and out of holding accounts etc, many of those shares subject to previous splits, but have never seen this particular issue before.

RDougG

Apologies, $223.46/share.

RDougG

OK. As a work-around, I created another account in my Quicken file, added the shares in as 700 shares, cost $7821.06, purchase date 10/7/2011. All is good. Except now I have to remember that I have these AMZN shares in this other account until they get returned to the original account from whence they came. And I'm left scratching my head as to what remnant is hiding in the original account that is wreaking this havoc in the first place...

Mark1104

do you have a transaction in March, 2022 for a 20:1 stock split? if not use the "stock split" transaction type and enter it.

Tom Young

I guess one approach here might be to hunt down all Amazon transactions everywhere in the file, delete them all, and then re-enter them all.  Every once in a while a transaction or some combination of transactions goes awry - stray cosmic ray? - and re-entering will miraculously fix things.

q_lurker

That investing / portfolio view has an As Of date specification. 

I would customize a view to include only AMZN and include all accounts. Group by accounts so as necessary you can expand the lots as you did here.  I would then walk the as of date back trying to identify when and then how this value went off the rails. 

Hopefully, you could then delete and re-enter the problematic transaction. 

Mark1104

I still say it has something to do with the 20:1 split, so see if it appears correct in Feb, 2022..... and then incorrect in March, 2022.  then more likely to have something to do with that 20:1 stock split.