Fidelity - Security with same symbol appears with different names in retirement accounts
I have a situation, across multiple accounts - security with same symbol appears with slightly different names:
A/C ABC company 401k Account: FXAIX - Fidelity 500 Index Fund
A/C XYZ company 401k Account: FXAIX - FID 500 Index
How do I merge both the securities so that the price history remains the same and I do not end up manually changing the names for hundreds of transactions over the years.
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There can be a variety of issues here. Frankly, if it were me, I'd take on the task of "manually changing the names for hundreds of transactions over the years" and then deleting the now unused version of the security (after first making sure I had a usable backup on hand).
Issue 1: Are these 401k investments truly in the retail fund FXAIX. It is not uncommon for retirement plan administrators to offer an investment option that mirrors the retail fund, but the buys occur and 'shares' are valued at different prices than the retail fund. These 401k 'funds' are typically administered in Units rather than shares. Could this be your case? If so, they should not be using the FXAIX ticker and they should be treated as separate security (if their prices are truly different).
Issue 2: Are these transactions being downloaded from some financial institution (FI) into your Quicken? Likely 2 different FIs? If so, the Security List should show a CUSIP for each fund. Is it the same? If they are different, likely they should remain different securities and should also have different tickers.
So assuming they really are duplicates of the same real world security and you still won't do the manual name change, you can try a Corporate Acquisition or Mutual Fund Conversion action. (MF Conversion may have problems if the fund is set to use average cost.) Either of those will Remove Shares of the one fund (one transaction) and Add Shares of the overtaking fund (one new transaction per lot; could be 100s of them). MF Conversion would be within one account. Corp Acq would be applied to all holdings of that acquired security. Neither of these would alter transactions prior to your chosen date, so you would still have 100s of transactions with each name and then 100s with the new selected (acquiring or converted to) security.
Still pushing the manual change, if you get your preferred security into your clipboard (Ctrl-C), working through the list of transactions with Ctrl-V (Paste) and Enter goes surprisingly quick. Once done, you should be able to delete the now unused version of the security.
Once done, I would likely edit the both securities, undo the checkbox for Matched with online security, and then make sure both accounts (FI downloads) properly match to your preferred version with the next download.
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@q_lurker - Thanks for your detailed reply. These are transactions downloaded from Fidelity when I worked at different employers over several years. Though the ticker symbol is the same the CUSIP ID's are indeed different. Based on your reply, manual way though tedious is the safest route. I wish Quicken would allow bulk changes such as this.
I did manually change for one of the securities and realized that the share count does not exactly match Fidelity holdings page. As an example:
FXAIX in Quicken holdings pop up - 36.36372 - $6040.97
FXAIX in Fidelity holdings page - 37.365 - $6,041.17
The difference of $0.20 while not a deal breaker is annoying. After spending sometime, I see that Fidelity's record keeping fee deductions are introducing the differences.
Any thoughts of how to handle this to ensure the total number of shares in Quicken match the numbers on Fidelity holdings?
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@q_lurker - Thanks for the detailed reply. These are 401k transactions downloaded from Fidelity while working with multiple employers over the years. I have decided to go the manual route based on your recommendation and also looking into this further online.
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Any thoughts of how to handle this to ensure the total number of shares in Quicken match the numbers on Fidelity holdings?
First, I hope there was a mis-key — that the two share counts are 36.36372 vs 36.365 leading to the Fidelity share count and value just slightly higher than your Quicken values. A full share discrepancy (37.365) would indicate a bigger issue.
I always make the effort to ensure the share count I get from a download and from Quicken computations agree and are to the same precision, same number of digits after the decimal point. That may require tweaking a transaction. There have also been FIs who download with a different precision than they show on their online presentations and possibly on their official statements to the client. One of my mantras is "Don't trust the FI to get the download right for your needs." Review and understand.
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