Deleting brokerage transactions has no effect

Steve29

I'm reconciling a Quicken brokerage account to my monthly statement. (This has worked fine for years). I download the month's transactions. And I discover that the total shares of one ETF is wrong in Quicken. I start looking for the error. And I discover that I can delete transactions from the list without changing the total number of shares displayed. I continue experimenting and find that this is true of most but not all the ETFs in this account. It's as if the totals are frozen.

Does anyone have a thought about this? I assume I'm doing something wrong, but I'm mystified.

(CPU is a Mac Studio)

Thanks,

Steve

RickO

This is likely caused by a placeholder transaction in the register. Placeholders are transactions that are automatically placed in the register for Quicken to keep the share balance at what it believes are those reported by the brokerage. Placeholders can sometimes be wrong. Deleting the placeholder will usually solve the problem, although you may need to put in a manual share adjustment to get the share balance correct after deleting a placeholder.

To find a placeholder, search the register for "placeholder". You can limit the search to the Memo field to speed it up.

More info:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7658265/faq-what-are-placeholder-transactions-in-quicken-for-mac

Steve29

Thanks, Rick. Good suggestion, but I searched for placeholder in all columns — no hits.

Here's another possible clue — I can delete dividend reinvestment transactions from money market funds and the total number of shares changes. But if I do the same thing with other funds, the totals don't change. Does that tell you anything?

Thanks again —

UKR

If this was a problem with an ETF in Quicken for Windows, I'd suspect an incorrectly defined Security entry.
An ETF Security entry must be defined as Type = Mutual Fund or Stock.
It cannot be defined as Type = Market Index. That type is reserved for true a Market Index like the Dow Jones.

Could that be your problem?

Steve29

Thanks, but I don't think so. It's been working fine for years. Nothing changed in terms of the definition of any security. But I checked anyway. They're all "Type = Mutual Fund".