Quicken Realized Gain Report inaccurate

gwdehart

The Quicken Realized Gain Report does not match the report from Morgan Stanley. Best I can figure out, Quicken uses the oldest purchase stock price to calculate gain and Morgan Stanley uses the most recent purchase. I heard from my broker, they use the highest purchase price, which looks to track with my small sample.

How do we get to match investment reports to match.

MontanaKarl

Yes, Quicken uses FIFO by default. I've never heard of Morgan Stanley's "highest price per share basis lot" method as a default. (Nothing wrong - you can always choose which basis lot you're selling… just that generally FIFO is the default.)

Your result is one of dozens of reasons that the Quicken Schedule D report should never be used for tax filing purposes vs the 1099 Composite received from your brokerage.

To get your Quicken report as close as possible to Morgan Stanley, you'll need to go back to every affected Sell transaction and click the "Specify Lots" button to choose the same basis lot that they did. If you have multiple sales throughout the year, this will be a little bit of a hassle as you need to restore your basis lots to what they were originally by deleting all of the sale entries and then re-entering them in date order with the desired basis lot specified.

Jon

Investment accounts have options in Account Settings where you can choose to use either FIFO or LIFO. I've never tried the LIFO settings but maybe selecting those for your Morgan Stanley accounts would get Quicken to more closely match what your broker is doing.

jacobs

And if you have any mutual funds which use Average Cost Basis (which is the default for Vanguard, among others), then you're out of luck, because Quicken Mac still does not allow users to select this cost basis, and there's no work-around of selecting specific lots. Average Cost is an easy calculation, and Quicken even shows Average Cost in the Portfolio, so I continue to be frustrated that the developers haven't added such a small but important option for users over the past 9 years. I would never use the Schedule D report for tax filing, but I would use it an the recently-added Capital Gains Estimator for tax planning purposes, and I can't for my ACB investment holdings.