Transferring Merrill investment accounts to Fidelity

stevedell

My financial advisor has moved from Merrill to Fidelity. I have about 20 years of history with my Merrill IRA's, ROTH IRA's and investment accounts. I need to keep the history.

I download transactions daily into Quicken.

The accounts will be moved over completely as of next week.

How do i begin downloading transactions into these existing accounts thru Fidelity instead of Merrill?

What are the specific steps I have to take to make this happen and keep my history?

Thanks in advance for your recommendations.

NotACPA

2 options:

1. Open, in Q, a Fidelity account an let the initial download into that acct populate everything. Keeping the Merrill acct as History.

2) Disconnect the/All Merrill accounts from download, Edit the account to remove references to Merrill and connect the acct to Fidelity

stevedell

Option #2 worked just fine.

One more question.

Background:
Two of the five accounts were successfully moved from Merrill to Fidelity earlier this week. During that process, Merrill added a series of "removed from account" transactions that were downloaded.

For the smaller ROTH IRA account, I deleted all of them as I wanted to keep the history. When I then linked the old Merrill account to the new one at Fidelity, it "add to the account" those same securities and cash. Since these were all duplicates, doubling the value of the account, I also deleted all of the "add to account" transactions. That was tedious.

Figuring there might be a better way, for my larger conventional IRA I accepted all the "removed from account" downloaded transactions from Merrill. I then established the account and Fidelity and downloaded all of the "add to account" transactions. All's good.

Finally, my question:
For IRA's and ROTH IRA's the history is not important for capital gains. However, I have one large taxable investment account. When this transfers, I assume I'll have a series of "removed from account" transactions from Merrill and a similar series of "add to account" transactions from Fidelity. If I accept the "remove" and "accept" transactions from Merrill and Fidelity respectively, will I lose my basis and acquisition data?

mshiggins

Here is a more detailed description for changing brokerages while retaining transaction history:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7930273/faq-changing-brokerages