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ETrade / Morgan Stanley conversion and rounding of share lots

meeotch

My ETrade account was transitioned to the new Morgan Stanley platform this weekend, following the acquisition. In their FAQ (General Changes section), it says:

"Share quantity for your portfolio and watch list positions will be rounded and adjusted to three decimal places (from five decimal places previously). Your historical data on E*TRADE platforms, however, will continue to display five decimal places."

This seems to be true, and has caused Quicken to start throwing warnings about holdings mismatches for some securities. I can go in and adjust the last reinvested dividend to make the holdings match, and kill the warnings…

BUT - this seems like it's going to cause headaches down the line, every time I sell a partial position and have to specify lots. (Which I do, for tax loss harvesting.) The lot specification screen on ETrade now shows three decimal places. I don't know if they're doing magic behind the scenes to reconcile the 3-digit and 5-digit lot sizes, or if they've rounded each individual lot to 3 digits…

But when the sale downloads to Quicken, it'll presumably be 3 digits, and when I specify the lots sold in Quicken (where they haven't been rounded), I'll have to make an adjustment again to make the holdings match.

Has anyone found a suitable workaround for this? With auto dividend reinvestment, I've got many hundreds of individual lots - I can't manually round them all.

Image that shows the discrepancy:

etrade.jpg

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Comments

Quicken Kristina

Hello @meeotch,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community and telling us about this issue. I'm sorry to hear you're running into this problem. Due to the nature of this issue, I recommend that you contact Quicken Support directly for further assistance as they can walk you through troubleshooting steps in real-time and escalate the situation as needed. The Quicken Support phone number can be found through this link here. Phone support is available from 5:00 am PT to 5:00 pm PT, Monday through Friday.

I apologize that I could not be of more assistance!

mikemcd001

Same.

mpafumi77

Same here. I'm curious how others are planning to handle this.

entropy

I have a bad feeling about this.

jjrichards

I am running Win 10 and Quicken Premier for Windows. During the conversion process from E Trade to Morgan Stanley on most of my accounts I am receiving warnings that the downloaded number of shares from E trade does not match the number in shares in Quicken .

I was reading some posts that E trade used to go out five decimals , Morgan Stanley now only goes out three decimals . Almost all of my stocks are off I did not check each stock for the amount difference .

My questions

Has anyone else encountered this issue ?
How do you correct in Quicken ? I do not want to use a placeholder

Thank you

[Merged Post]

mpafumi77

To solve this, I added in Quicken fractional shares to account for the rounding up with a 9/1/2023 acquired date and no ($0) purchase price, which I think is effectively what Morgan Stanley did. If anyone has a better solution, please let us know.

MangoMan

This is going to be a pain [Removed - Language] for everyone. I agree with mpafumi77 that adding fractional $0 cost shares may be the only solution, but today (9/19) I am seeing new mismatches of ones already put in about a week ago. Hopefully this settles out soon and new dividend reinvestment transactions will have the correct amount.

Could be worse - Merrill sends 3 transactions for a single dividend reinvestment. 🙄

Jim_Harman

What I have done in this situation is the following:

Go to Edit > Preferences > Downloaded transactions and select the account under Compare account portfolio after download. Despite what the Help text says, this does not automatically create Placeholders. At the end of each download session, it displays the Security Comparison Mismatch dialog if there are any securities where the downloaded share balance is different from Quicken's balance by more than .001 share.
Note any differences then dismiss the dialog.
For each affected security, edit its previous transaction (usually a ReinvDiv or a Bought following a Div) adjusting the number of shares by the small amount needed to make the balance match the downloaded balance. This will adjust the share balance and preserve the correct cost basis
When you are done, check your work by clicking on the gear at the top right of the account and selecting Reconcile shares. If the balances agree, you will get a small dialog to that effect. If not, you will get the Security Comparison Mismatch dialog again and you can re-do the correction.

Please let us know if this works for you.

jjrichards

Jim:

On the conversion E trade had 5 decimals after the number of shares , Morgan Stanley goes out only three. Majority of my stocks are off .0001 to .0005 , and like you indicated when dividend reinvestment is downloaded Quicken provides the number of shares vs Etrade . I thought the solution would be to add a small fraction of shares ( add new shares ) to each stock and the shares would match . However the number of shares in Quicken did not change . I left the price blank and tried 1.00, nothing worked. I did not o back to last div reinvested and try your solution .

Do you know why just adding new shares ( granted small amount ) would adjust the balance ?

Jim_Harman

My guess would be that the share balance downloads are as of yesterday's close, so Quicken is comparing your holdings as of yesterday to those share balances. Adding more shares today won't correct that mismatch.

Also your approach of adding shares will make their cost basis zero, which will make Quicken's cost basis incorrect. I think correcting the last reinvested dividend is a better way to go.

mpafumi77

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20385551#Comment_20385551

Is the cost basis really incorrect, though? If Morgan Stanley rounded up, say, .0005 shares, didn't we effectively get .0005 shares at $0.00 cost on 9/1/2023? What am I missing?

mpafumi77

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20385543#Comment_20385543

All of my dividend transactions after 9/1 have had just three decimal places. Are you seeing more for transactions after 9/1?

Jim_Harman

You are right, the total cost basis is still correct. But when you make those Added adjustments, you are creating tiny zero-cost tax lots in Quicken that do not exist in real life.

If you make a partial sale at some point, which of those lots will you include to make the share total match the lots MS has recorded?

jjrichards

Jim:

When I added the small number of additional shares I made the effective date 9-1 -23. Another user suggested this would be the date to input .

If Adding shares does not work ( not sure why when I use 9-1 effective date ) , if I understand your remedy go into the last dividend reinvestment I received in each stock I am off , and just increase the small number of shares in my case ranges from .0001 to .0008

Thank you

Jeff

LouDernosek

I'm having a number of different problems since the conversion… Most alarmingly, I've made a number of trades in my E*TRADE brokerage accounts in the last few days; but the transactions are not showing up in Quicken. I've spoken with both Quicken and E*TRADE technical support but so far they're just pointing fingers at each other. E*TRADE says they're sending the transactions but Quicken initially indicated they weren't receiving them. After I pulled up the Quicken log file on my computer, it's clear that Quicken is receiving them but apparently doesn't know what to do with them. Not sure whose problem it is; but the two are clearly not communicating correctly - messages are either encoded incorrectly by E*TRADE, or Quick is not correctly decoding them…

The Quicken support person pointed me to an alert that doesn't seem to apply to my situation.

Very frustrating for me…