How to sort investment holding funds by mutual funds, stock, and bonds

Question

Most months my downloads do not agree with my Fidelity reports.  It would be easier to find the Quicken errors.  The Quicken errors could be price issues or Quicken picking up the wrong stock from Fidelity.  Such as General Mills for General Motors.  If their is a stock merger or split Quicken does not handle.

Tom Young · Answer

"Quicken can never handing stock mergers correct"

IF you are relying on "downloads" to make entries into your Transaction List (register) THEN the hard and inconvenient truth is that by and large you simply CANNOT trust "downloads" from your broker to handle many "corporate actions" like mergers and acquisitions.  In many cases you have to delete those downloads and substitute your own entries.

That's due in part that downloads can't kick off Investment Account "actions" (i.e., Quicken's investment "wizards") and due in part that there are some mergers and acquisitions where there simply is no "wizard" available.   Quicken's wizards generally do work well for stock splits, corporate stock for stock mergers, and simple corporate spin-offs, but you need to be in a position where you understand what's going on and actually initiate those actions.

In particular, recording any "stock plus cash" event requires your careful scrutiny and a deeper understanding of how the event is structured for tax purposes as there's no "one size fits all" set of entries that will work for each and every stock plus cash event.  In some cases you have to wait for a Form 8937 to be issued,  do your own calculations outside of Quicken, and then create your own set of entries, including Removed and Added actions, to get everything to work.

Jerry J · Answer

Thanks, I will try with your input.  One for the problems on that happens is that one month the information will be correct and the next month not.  Both in pricing and mutual fund matching.  Quicken can never handing stock mergers correct.  They must have inexperienced programmers.

Tom Young · Answer

Over in the Portfolio View under the Investments tab you can sort by "Security Type" to get that kind of information.

Quicken doesn't "pick" stocks, you identify stocks as part of your setup of a new security in Quicken and the security is "identified" by the unique CUSIP number of that stock.  The CUSIP number comes from the broker.  If you're not getting the correct information about a particular stock you should go into the Edit Security Details screen and uncheck "Matched with online security."  The next time you download investment information Quicken will ask you to identify the correct security.