Covered Call Transaction Recording

MangoMan

Not sure why Quicken doesn't have better help or investing choices for selling and closing out a Covered Call. Always feels like users have to do work-arounds to make our trades fit the limited choices in Quicken. I should not have to trick the software.

So I put my original Selling of a CC in as a ShtSell of the CC option including the price per option received and brokerage fee paid - No problem.

Now the CC expired worthless (strike price not met) and I want to close it out in my portfolio. Should be a simple Cover Short (CvrSht) transaction, but Noooooo….Quicken gives me an error message and says "You should use two transactions: one to cover the shares you shorted and one to create your hold position" - What Hold position?? No other explanation provided.

I did also try to find a previously posted question on this.

I ended up doing a Buy transaction first of the CC option and then a CvrSht. No error message now, but then I have to go back and delete the new Buy transaction to remove the extra options from my portfolio 🤦‍♂️

Tom Young

It's been quite a while since I've written covered calls, but I've always found that the ShtSeel/CvrShrt actions have worked properly:

My guess is that you have some transaction in your file that Quicken is stumbling over, and that the problem isn't that ShtSeel/CvrShrt actions don't work. You might try doing {Ctrl}-z in that Account to make Quicken re-calculate it positions.

MangoMan

I'll see if that works the next time I need to close one. Thanks. 😉