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Brokerage account not displaying my money market cash

R Strax

Using Quicken Version 8.0.1 (Build 800.56243.100), Mac OS 15.2.

My Fidelity brokerage account in Quicken lists all of my holdings except my government money market fund (SPAXX). This is my default or sweep cash fund in this account. The balance is significant and therefore the total balance shown in my brokerage account in Quicken is way off.

When I view my account at Fidelity, it does not list the government money market among my securities and I'm sure that's the source of the problem. Instead Fidelity just shows a cash balance available for trade, which is actually the money market balance. Curiously, Quicken shows a small cash balance for this account which is very different from the actual amount of my money market and I don't know where this cash balance even came from.

Are there any suggestions for how to correct this inaccuracy? Can I somehow add my government money market fund as a security in the brokerage displayed on Quicken?

If this is unclear, I'd be happy to answer any questions. I greatly appreciate any help you can provide. Thanks!

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R Strax

I took this problem into my own hands. I simply added an "add shares" transaction of SPAXX in the current amount and now it displays correctly. I also added a "miscellaneous expense" transaction equal to the unexplained cash balance and now the overall balance of my brokerage account is in good alignment with the display on Fidelity. I'm always uncomfortable making these tweaks to my brokerage but the end result is OK and I'm satisfied. Thanks for help as always! Also, always open to any suggestions from people who are far more knowledgeable than myself :-)

Quicken Kristina

Hello @R Strax,

Thank you for coming to the Community and sharing your experience. Thank you also for sharing the solution you found.

Based on earlier posts about SPAXX, it sounds like when Fidelity sends the information to us, they represent it as cash instead of as a holding:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20389517#Comment_20389517

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7957335/why-is-money-market-missing

I hope this helps!

R Strax

Thanks for your help!

Actually that’s not quite correct. Quicken simply ignores my money market fund, not reported as cash or listed as a fund. The brokerage account is simply lowered by the amount in my money market fund.

The displayed balance of my brokerage account in Quicken is not reconciled, is much lower than the actual balance because the money market fund is ignored. This poses a significant problem, something Quicken should try to address.

Thanks!

Boatnmaniac

@R Strax - Since SPAXX is your Core Fund, Fidelity will not download the shares of that to Quicken and will instead download the value of your SPAXX position as your Cash Balance.

If you have shares of SPAXX in your account in Quicken you will need to remove them or Quicken will add Placeholder transactions to remove those shares to account for this. This will also result in the value of your Account in Quicken and in Portfolio View as being incorrect, causing an overstatement or understatement of your account value balance because your expensing the Cash Balance will be offset the next time you download from Fidelity when Fidelity will replace the Cash Balance you had previously expensed.

The steps to take to fix your account holdings of SPAXX and to ensure you show the correct Cash Balance are provided in both of the discussion threads that were provided by @Quicken Kristina above. Fidelity's rationale for doing it this way is also explained in there. Also, note that Fidelity is not alone is reporting the settlement fund value in this manner to Quicken.

That all being said, I received a letter from Fidelity last week that they are also making a change to the Core Account options that will be rolled out to investors between from Feb-June 2025. They will no longer offer SPAXX (nor any of the other Core Fund MMF options) to be used as the Core Fund. Instead they will be using a different security called FCASH. I am not yet sure how this change will be handled in Fidelity's downloads to Quicken. I might be done the same way or maybe done another way. We'll have to wait to find out.

This change to the Core Fund itself wouldn't bother me too much except that SPAXX and the other current Core Fund MMFs currently have 7-day yields of a little over 4% while FCASH's yields are running only a little over 2%. So essentially, Fidelity appears to be making a money grab and taking 1/2 of the investment returns for the Core Fund from investors and keeping it for themselves. I might be wrong about that but that is certainly the perception I have about it. My financial advisor essentially said he feels the same way that I do. Fortunately, I do not keep much cash in my Core Accounts so it's not going to break the bank but it is making me seriously consider moving all of our accounts elsewhere. The only thing holding me back from taking quicken action on this now is that Fidelity generally works very well with Quicken and I find a lot of value in that.

Boatnmaniac

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20473643#Comment_20473643

This is not a Quicken issue. Fidelity has been doing it this way since at least the early 2000s.

And the issue is not with the Cash Balance because Quicken downloads the Cash Balance every time you run OSU so that number is correct. What is not correct is that your account is still both at Fidelity and in Quicken to allow for transactions of SPAXX. So, your SPAXX transactions are consuming cash which is not reflected in the downloaded Cash Balance in Quicken. Please do read through the email threads referenced by @Quicken Kristina. The refer back to what needs to be done to get and keep your account in Quicken in balance.

R Strax

Thanks to all for taking the time to provide excellent and thoughtful advice.

I must say again that the cash balance shown in my Quicken brokerage account and the balance in my money market account are vastly different. There is no way that Quicken was considering my money market to be cash. The balance in my money market fund was $95,000 while Quicken showed my cash balance to be $3000. As a result, my brokerage balance shown on Quicken was nearly $100,000 too low.

I will review the thread referenced by @Quicken Kristina. Thanks for that!

I can understand if Quicken has difficulty differentiating between my core cash account and actual cash, but shouldn’t it reconcile the total account balance with Fidelity? How could it be off by nearly $100,000 and not warn me of a problem?

Boatnmaniac

There is no way that Quicken was considering my money market to be cash. The balance in my money market fund was $95,000 while Quicken showed my cash balance to be $3000. As a result, my brokerage balance shown on Quicken was nearly $100,000 too low.

It seems you might be looking at this issue as simply being about a dollar amount discrepancy between the Market Value of SPAXX at Fidelity and the Cash Balance in Quicken. It is much more than that. It is also about the cumulative effect of how Buy, Sell and ReinvDiv transactions were reported and managed in Quicken and in your online Fidelity.com account which can easily result is variances of many tens of thousands of dollars or more. I think as you review the email referenced above and take actions to resolve the issue as described in that email you will find the discrepancy will go away. Just be sure to back up your file before you undertake make the needed changes/corrections.

I can understand if Quicken has difficulty differentiating between my core cash account and actual cash, but shouldn’t it reconcile the total account balance with Fidelity? How could it be off by nearly $100,000 and not warn me of a problem?

I can't speak to what QMac's capabilities are in this regard but in QWin there is some limited automatic reconciliation of sorts that Quicken does do regarding share holdings. If the number of shares of a security reported by the financial institution does not match the number of shares that are shown in Quicken, Quicken will, depending on how you have set up the Preferences, prompt you to enter a Placeholder transaction or add missing transaction(s) or edit an incorrect transaction to resolve the issue or it will automatically enter a Placeholder transaction which you will then need to resolve.

Quicken will not automatically inform you of an imbalance in the Cash Balance amounts. Like with any other type of account that gets downloaded, it is up to the user to do the actual reconciliations via the tools that are provided in Quicken. In QWin for investment accounts we have the Reconcile Shares tool which will identify most holdings discrepancies that exist. And we can click on the Cash Balance to see whether or not there is a mismatch between what the investment company has downloaded vs what is shown in Quicken and then we can use the Reconcile (cash) tool to help address that.

If you are not familiar with what QMac capabilities and tools are in this regard, then perhaps someone with QMac expertise will step in an offer some assistance.