why does quicken see some transfers as capital gains?

Question

I make transfers between a taxable money market account at Vanguard and my checking account at a bank. Some, but not all, of those transfers show up in quicken reports as "Realized Gain/Loss"

They are simple transfers. Some show as Gain/Loss and others with the same characteristics do not.  I see no consistency. There's one strange number that doesn't relate to an existing transaction at all; it shows what seems to be a random amount.

Any idea why this is happening?

Thanks

JS

quicken mac

goshawk · Answer

Jon, thanks. I see that each Vanguard MMF withdrawal involves two transactions: a "sell" and a "payment/deposit".  It's the "sell" items that show up as Gains in the category report. Some were transfers to my bank; some were paper checks written against the MMF; two were transfers to my Vanguard IRA.

Maybe I could just ignore the pesky Gains in the category report.

But there's more. One withdrawal, a paper check for about 40K, doesn't show up on the report. Instead, there are three entries in the report for that day: two are $0.00 and the third is a seemingly random number roughly 9% of the 40k. The random number correlates to nothing else in any transaction, and the zeros are a mystery.

Is this operator error, or is something strange and wifty happening in Quicken? I want it not be Quicken.

Jon · Answer

Since Quicken doesn't have a investment category for money market funds they wind up classified as mutual funds and treated as if there could be a potential gain or loss when sold (even though in reality there won't be one for a MMF). I see $0 Realized Gain/Loss entries on Category reports every time I take cash out of a MMF.

If you transferred the money market fund shares in-kind then I would not expect a realized gain entry to show up on a report, but I wouldn't expect that to be the case when transferring money to a checking account.