Options Trading Fidelity-to-Quicken Mac download oddities
My housemate trades lots of options. He was horrified when he saw a whole lot of "Expired PUT" and "Expire CALL" entries in his Quicken portfolio. We also have a shared portfolio and I'm seeing the same behavior. There aren't any actually-expired calls or puts; when he gets one wrong, he always bails out before it expires.
Oddly, I did find some entries that have a *really* informative Security/Payee field value ("CALL (AAPL) APPLE INC DEC 10 21 $155 (100 SHS)") for both the buy and associated sell transaction. Why can't they all be like that?
I'd hoped that exporting transactions might shed some light. The csv from Fidelity is missing a lot of the fields that would be routinely included in a qxf export, so it was of no help. I don't know of a good way of digging through the raw qxf export. The csv file exported from Quicken only contains the displayable fields, again, of no use.
I spoke at length with Quicken. The rep was adamant that those particular fields are displayed as-is. I am fairly well convinced that the problem is in the source data from Fidelity, not Quicken's misrepresentation of said data. With whom might I speak about debugging this issue?
Quicken gets the realized capital gains and holding period right. I think the only way to have a GAIN on an expired option is to have SOLD one and have it expire, giving you a positive return. He does not sell options that he has not bought.
On Quicken's end, the Symbol field is the only one that lists the security.
• Portfolio view: Symbol is available but there is no way to remove the offending Name field.
• Transactions view: It's quite amusing to see Memo/Notes "YOU BOUGHT" followed by "Expired CALL <xxxx>." By definition, once it expires, there is nothing that one can do with that option.
• Dashboard view: Choose "Use Symbol," which is not the default, but at least it's there.
Thoughts?