Stocks with 0 Share Balance, Still Showing in "Holdings" for Investment Account

James J

For the love of all that is good on this green earth, please tell me how I can make these 0 share balance line items go away. If I had a line item in my brokerage account's "holdings" for every stock or bond I have sold, it'd be a mess. So thankfully this has happened only a couple times. But it's a PITA.

splasher

As a test, what happens if you make a transaction that sells ALL of the stock for $0 to clear out any almost zero qty?

James J

@splasher That's a good idea, I had not thought to try that. When I put a check mark in the "Sell all shares . . . .", Quicken does that auto-populate the "Number of shares" field with a value, which is strange, because in the "holdings" view Quicken is telling me that I have 0 shares. So it does seem like some wires got crossed somewhere. This is in an ETrade brokerage and they had a change to Morgan Stanley a few years ago that may have goofed up some records.

The result of attempt to sell the ghost shares, is that Quicken let me do it but told me that I am recording a "short sale". And it now shows my ghost shares as having negative value.

splasher

That's no good. What if you go back to the last transaction for that security which was probably a Sell, you change it to Sell ALL?

If you haven't already, make a backup in case something goes terribly wrong and you need to do a restore.

James J

@splasher That also resulted in the stocks showing with a negative value.

I see this for both stocks. Does it make any sense to have a negative sale? For what it's worth, I have never intentionally short-sold any stocks.

James J

@splasher Thanks for your help! You forced me to take a breath and think through this logically instead of just being frustrated. So, for some reason, about 7 years ago I had short sales recorded for both of the two problematic stocks. I am certain I no longer hold either of these in my brokerage, so I want Quicken to not include them in my "holdings" tab.

What worked, is for me to delete the short sales from the brokerage account, then "update share balance" to zero as of today. Now neither stock appears in my "holdings". I have just ensured my brokerage account shows the correct number of shares and price per share for the only two remaining equities in the account. Quicken's "Securities Value" matches (within about 7 cents) the value I see online for my brokerage. Quicken's cash balance is a little low, but I will simply update that and I will be good to go for the new year. I think that, 7 years ago, there were some stock splits and Seadrill went bankrupt and at that time I just did not know how to properly handle things in Quicken and I probably made some mistakes.

splasher

I'm glad to have been your muse in finding the real cause and solution.