Quicken Unable to Transfer Short Positions Between Accounts
TradesGalore
Quicken Windows Subscription Member
I transferred a short option position between two of my accounts at my brokerage house.
I track all of my investing account activity with Quicken - cash, stocks and options. Both long and short positions for options and stocks. So in the latest version of Quicken I tried the "Shares Transferred Between Accounts" action and entered the "Target account" and "Security name". However when I attempt to enter the "Number of shares", which is a negative number (for a short position), Quicken is unable to handle it. The field for "Number of shares" will only accept a positive number.
The transfer only works for long positions (positive number of shares) but not for short positions (negative number of shares).
Quicken allows for both entering and covering short sales and is able to track short positions in an account, so why can't it handle the transfer of a short position to another account?
I see other posts here going back several years about this issue. None of the suggested workarounds that I have tried are satisfactory and there are tax implications if the transfer is not handled correctly.
This is a limitation that needs to be addressed by the development team.
I used Quicken Version R47.15 and Build 27.1.47.15.
I track all of my investing account activity with Quicken - cash, stocks and options. Both long and short positions for options and stocks. So in the latest version of Quicken I tried the "Shares Transferred Between Accounts" action and entered the "Target account" and "Security name". However when I attempt to enter the "Number of shares", which is a negative number (for a short position), Quicken is unable to handle it. The field for "Number of shares" will only accept a positive number.
The transfer only works for long positions (positive number of shares) but not for short positions (negative number of shares).
Quicken allows for both entering and covering short sales and is able to track short positions in an account, so why can't it handle the transfer of a short position to another account?
I see other posts here going back several years about this issue. None of the suggested workarounds that I have tried are satisfactory and there are tax implications if the transfer is not handled correctly.
This is a limitation that needs to be addressed by the development team.
I used Quicken Version R47.15 and Build 27.1.47.15.
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Comments
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You are correct that Quicken has never handled short positions with the Shares Transferred action. I don't know what workarounds you noted, but the only one I could imagine would be to close the short in the old account at cost - no gain/loss - and then recreate the position in the new account. I don't know enough to think that such an approach is 100% adequate.
Given the very limited level of comments about this deficiency, I would doubt that this is very high on their punch list.1 -
Your proposal would appear to be the simplest and best workaround currently as it would maintain the correct balances for options and cash and would have no tax implications. The only issue is that it would create artificial extra transactions (a short cover in the originating account and a short sale in the destination account) which would not match the data the broker retains and submits to the IRA for tax purposes.
Ideally, the software developers on the Quicken team would fill this gap in functionality and make the product more complete.
To this end I have spoken to Quicken support management and escalated the issue with them. Ticket number 10085059 was created to track and hopefully resolve this shortcoming.
Thanks for your idea!1
This discussion has been closed.