Fidelity NetBenefits CUSIP weirdness

GermanBlueRam

I have no idea whether this has anything to do with the recent problems with downloading, duplicate securities, etc. But shortly before the long outage last month (during which I had no problems even though my wife did) I had a securities mismatch for my Vanguard institutional (no ticker) funds. I went back into my register, sorted by security and basically renamed everything to the "new" security information that I had downloaded. It probably took me about 30 minutes -just a minor annoyance in the scheme of things.

For my S&P 500 fund, the first time this happened, I simply added a "b" to the name I was using (the downloaded name was VANG INST 500 IDX TR), to match the new downloaded security information. I deleted the old security, which I had earlier named VANGUARD INSTITUTIONAL 500 INDEX TRUST.

This worked fine for about a month, and then this morning, the issue arose again. The same thing happened with the security I had named VANGUARD RETIREMENT SAVINGS TRUST II, although in this case I didn't delete the security and you can see it in the dialog below (the "b" is just something I did to differentiate and match the downloaded information). I am not aware of any changes to the underlying securities. I guess I'll go back and do what I did earlier, but this is now getting super annoying.

mshiggins

There are some oddities with securities with no ticker symbol. I always add a made up ticker symbol if the security has no ticker of its own. That seems to help avoid issues.

If you wanted to try that, for your Vanguard Institutional 500 Index Trust, you could try something like VI500IT.