Merrill Edge (others, too?) (Lots/Costs Moving Over Funded by Transfer of Equities)

MauryJ

This is regarding cost and lot history not moving over. I just had a lightbulb go off that I wanted to share regarding the creation of an Edge Acct 4 years ago that was funded by transferring assets from a traditional Merrill Acct. This may work for other institutions.

A lot of times Merrill loves to use "Shares Added" and "Shares Removed" and you lose lot costs and dates. In my case I ended up with a lump sum of shares added on the creation date of the account at $0 cost. This solved it.

This started back in 2020. Two assets were completely moved, and one was partially moved. Interestingly, the one partially moved retained lot data going back 6 years to a prior Fidelity account, then to a Merrill Account, and a year later, to a Merril Edge Account. Of the other 2 equities, one's history goes back to only 2019, the other to 2007! Both had the same path (Fidelity » Merrill Traditional » Merrill Edge).

Those 2 equities were just moved in kind. No cost history followed, so not only did I not have lots, but even worse, I didn't even have an average cost. My performance history in the account was very skewed. I was unsure how create an average cost for "Shares Added," so I kept putting it off. Four years later I had many dividend reinvestments since creating the account, and it was showing average costs as just a fraction of true cost.

Today I backed up the file & rolled the dice. As an experiment, I changed "Shares Removed" to "Transfer Shares" on the original account's register (right click, edit shares). Then designated the Edge account as the destination, not changing the date or any other parameters.

What happened next shocked me. First, my Edge register now a ton of lot entries for purchases and reinvested dividends. They were all dated 9/2/2020, which was the date of the move. The value of the account went up by the amount of the original transfer. Then I deleted the original "Shares Added" to bring the account balance in line.

Next I went to the "Portfolio" tab to check costs - (drop downs set to "Portfolio Value" and "By Security.") All of my original lots were there, with the correct dates, and the original costs. This is data that made the transition from a Windows file to Mac in 2022, plus some of it goes back 17 years, and it all just "reappeared."

I think sometimes I under estimate what Quicken can do. Windows has a feature where you can click on any security and see your lot history and equity performance by value or stock price in a graph, and across all accounts, including ones you've closed. When I migrated, that feature is missing and you just assume all this data has been discarded. This suggests to me that maybe the data is still all still there, just not always revealed.

jacobs

Yes, the Transfer Shares option works very well. Although the transaction dates of all the Add Shares transactions are the same, the Date Acquired for each transaction matches to original date acquired for every purchase and reinvested dividend in the old account, so your history is preserved. Is a brokerage downloads Add Shares transaction(s), you're usually better deleting them, doing the Transfer Shares transaction manually, and then you'll be set moving forwar,d with your history intact.

MauryJ

Thanks for the comment. Actually the history is totally intact in the Portfolio View, and with the proper dates. It's the Transaction View that has all the dates the same as the transfer date.

If I cared about the register as much as the portfolio, rather than totally do a ton of manual transactions, all I'd need to do would be to change the date of each one. I could get those dates from the Portfolio View, or export the portfolio to a CSV and use the spreadsheet as a reference to modify the register… Merrill has a lot more idiosyncrasies with how data is downloaded, but it's nice to know Quicken is more on the ball than I thought

jacobs

If I cared about the register as much as the portfolio, rather than totally do a ton of manual transactions, all I'd need to do would be to change the date of each one. I could get those dates from the Portfolio View

Actually, if you open each transaction, you'd see the Date Acquired field with the date you need; you could copy-and-paste the date to the Transaction date if you wanted.

But changing the transaction dates to the past would mess up your Portfolio, because on a date in the past, your holding would be showing in the old account (where it existed at that time) and the new account (if you manually set the dates back in time). So having all the Add Shares transactions on the day you actually transitioned the holdings, as Quicken does it, prevents that problem, while the Date Acquired insures that your historical chart of investments remains intact and accurate. 😀

MauryJ

Thanks for both of those tips! This is such a relief. And now with the new Security Detail, Quicken is on a roll as far as I'm concerned. That detail screen is awesome!