Mortgage Bond Misreporting number of shares

Rick16

I have 5 shares of a mortgage-related bond through Merrill Lynch that is amortized at .74420. However, when I reconcile shares for the account in Quicken, it indicates that "Shares Reported" as 372 instead of 500. 500 * .7442 = 372.

Is there a way that Quicken can report the number of shares coming from Merrill accurately for mortgage backed bonds?

Tom Young

Not really. There's no "factor" field in Quicken so if the financial institution is sending you the bond price prior to the application of the factor there's no programmatic way of massaging that quote to get it "right." You have to fix it manually.

Going the other way, if the financial institution is reporting the principal amount after application of the factor, there's no pragmatic way of fixing that either, beyond making manual entries. (The "372" isn't an "number of shares" figure, it's reporting the remaining principal amount of the bonds you own. Distributions to you are part interest and part principal reduction.)

To properly account properly for any bond where the "factor" is in play you need to do quite a bit of manual work, and just based on what I've read in here about these bonds it does appear that different financial institutions handle the Quicken reporting of these bonds differently.