Moving my four Vanguard accounts to Fidelity

Jim_Harman

OK, in that case go to the Fidelity account and click on Holdings. Click on the + sign next to SCHD to show the tax lots. If you set the As of date to before and after the transfer, are the new tax lots the same as you held at Vanguard?

Gary R

Exactly the same:

Fidelity—Lot 7/2/2024

Shares 774, Market Value $21,726, Cost Basis $19,999, Gain $1729

Vanguard—-Same numbers as Fidelity above

Gary R

Let me throw this out to see if this may be a solution:

Security Detail View shows SCHD shares of 1419, Average cost $26.4576

Would it make sense to delete all SCHD transactions for all accounts and just enter the current shares and cost basis as of 12/31/2024?

Jim_Harman

OK, lets try to narrow down what might be causing this.

Is this the only security with an incorrect Return YTD?

Is this the only security that you held in both accounts before the transfer?

Gary R

Yes—The only security with incorrect YTD

Dozens of securities held in both accounts transferred over with no problems

CD's, Treasuries, ETF's, all good except SCHD

Jim_Harman

Would it make sense to delete all SCHD transactions for all accounts and just enter the current shares and cost basis as of 12/31/2024?

That might fix your Return YTD problem, but it will mess with other performance measures. I don't think you should delete any transactions until we understand what is going on. If you want to experiment, set up a test file with just 2 accounts and just SCHD and see what happens.

Gary R

You're right —-deleting all SCHD will create a real mess. SCHD has lots of transactions over the past five years.

My YTD totals are off by $1100. Maybe, I'll just live with it this year and hopefully everything will be fine going forward.

Jim_Harman

In your Split entry for the Fidelity account, I see the post-split price is blank. In the Vanguard entry, it is $28.34. Assuming 28.34 is the correct post-split price, you should enter that in the Fidelity account also.

Also, the Return YTD depends on the closing share price for SCHD on 12/31/24. Open the Security Detail view for SCHD and click on More then Edit price history. Make sure the price is correct.

Gary R

Entered the $28.34 on Fidelity

Checked the 12/31/2024 price

Closed, exited Quicken

Opened and same problem

No Change

q_lurker

So as I understand it:

• 12/31/24
  • You had 645 shares in one account (F) @ 27.47 / share for a 17,718 market value
  • You had 774 shares in a second account (V) @ 27.47/share for a 21,262 market value
  • Value of both holdings was then 38,980.
• 03/05/25
  • Share price had increased to 28.05
  • The 645 share lot had increased in value by $374; the 774 share lot had increased by $449. The total holding in both account thus had increased by $823
• 03/06/25
  • You removed the 774 shares from account V.
  • You added 774 shares to account F with a basis of 19,999 and some acquisition date.
  • The closing price for the shares was 28.07/share meaning your two lots were valued at 18,105 and 21,726, respectively, for a total value of 39,831.
  • The increase in value was then 39,831 - 38,980 = $851

My hypothesis: Quicken is calculating the Return YTD on the added 774 shares as 03/06/25 value (21,726) less the cost basis of the added shares (19,999) to get 1,727. Adding that to the Return YTD of the 645 share lot (18,105 - 17,718 = 387) produces a value of 2,114.

Now the two key Return YTD values I have calculated (823 on 03/05 and 2,114 on 03/06) are not exact matches for what you seem to be seeing, they are close. So I have likely missed some particular detail.

I would also expect you to see this type of behavior associated with all the Add Shares transactions. There should not be anything special in this regard to this one security.

WHY would Quicken do that — use the cost basis of the Add Share transaction as the beginning of year data point? You have to realize that once the Shares Transferred wizard created the transactions on the Remove and Add sides, the transactions are wholly independent. That is, the Add Shares transaction is no different that if you had typed it in manually without reference to the other account. That is all Quicken sees as it evaluates that holding for a wide variety of calculations — on a date 774 shares were added with a basis value. In practicality, this is no different than if you bought those shares at that basis price on that date.

At the same time, recognize that the the removal of shares in the Vanguard account is immaterial to the calculation of the Return YTD of your current holdings. The portfolio view value is on your current holdings. From Quicken's perspective, you no longer hold the shares that had been in that account. They are gone.

I am not offering justification that Quicken is right in this regard. I will offer that it would take a lot more 'tracking' and detail to create an alternate approach that avoided this flaw you are seeing.

I'll also add that I think the Investment Performance Report and related Average Annual Return values likely avoid this aberration.

Two things you might do to confirm this hypothesis:

1. Edit the Amount in the Add Shares transaction and see of it creates a 1-to-1 change in the Return YTD value, or
2. Change the date (temporarily) on the Add Shares transaction to before 12/31/24 and see if the Return YTD value changes to a more expected value (consistent with the 03/05 value).

As to a workaround or something you could do to 'fix' this — nothing I can think of. (While moving all transactions from Vanguard account to the Fidelity account would avoid the issue, I would not consider doing that. It is too far away from the reality of what occurred where and when.)

Gary R

q lurker——I transferred four Vanguard accounts to Fidelity with a total of over fifty securities: stocks, bonds, CD's, ETF's, CEF's, and mutual funds. SCHD was the only security with an issue. I checked every security comparing the ending market value on March 8 to January 1, then went to security view to add dividends, interest, and ST gains. YTD returns were accurate except for SCHD.

I took your advice, changed the transfer date for the 774 shares to 12/31/2024 AND IT WORKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YTD returns for SCHD now shows $1618—-and that is the correct YTD returns

I never would have considered changing the date to 12/31/2024, but that did the trick

I can't thank you enough. Now my numbers are all in agreement.

q_lurker

Sigh — all that did in my opinion was confirm that Quicken is using the basis of the Add Shares transaction for the Return YTD calculation. Without seeing and testing your data, I can’t comment on why you see this for this security and not others.

I would not consider the date change a fix simply because it misrepresents reality — what was owned in what account when. YMOV (your mileage obviously varies).

You’re welcome.

Chris_QPW

I will admit that I haven't followed all the problems here, but it seems to me that all of this could be avoided if you took @Tom Young and mine advice and just deactivate the original account for downloading and then reactivated it for Fidelity. At the most that would have had to be cleaned up is some transactions that where for Fidelity depositing everything it their account.

Jim_Harman

@Chris_QPW The issue is that the OP is merging his Vanguard accounts into existing Fidelity accounts, not just moving them.

Gary R

Chris—I don't have a clue what you mean. I transferred my four Vanguard accounts into four Fidelity accounts. These Vanguard accounts go back ten plus years with numerous transactions. I need to keep these Vanguard accounts on my PC, even though they are being closed in Quicken.

Gary R

Q lurker—Everything looked good when I changed the ADD date to 12/31/2024 for SCHD, even though 3/6/25 was the correct date. However, now my January 1, 2025 opening market values are $20,000 more than they should be.

Jim_Harman

@Gary R What Chris is saying is that if the Vanguard accounts were moved to new accounts at Fidelity, not merged into existing ones, you could have simply disconnected them from Vanguard and connected them to Fidelity instead. It would have been as if they were Fidelity accounts since Day 1.

Because you said

The accounts from Vanguard are all going into established Fidelity Accounts, brokerage, Roth, and Traditional.

that was not an option.

Gary R

Jim—The Vanguard accounts all went into existing Fidelity accounts.

Quicken no longer has direct connect . I had to download directly from Vanguard each account separately to Quicken. Then, "Transfer shares between accounts"

Chris_QPW

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20480515#Comment_20480515

Actually, Vanguard still supports Direct Connect, it was just broken until recently.

And yes, I didn't realize the problem was a "merge". In that case I still wouldn't have used Transfer shares, which uses Add/Remove shares.

I would have used "Move Transactions" from the gear icon in the original investment account.

With "Move Transactions" you are literally moving the transactions from one account to another.

So, why wasn't that suggested?

1. New feature that the SuperUser's tend to forget about.
2. "Information is lost". Like the idea of just deactivating and reactivating the account which loses the fact that you ever had a Vanguard account, moving all the transactions from the Vanguard account loses that same information because now you just have transaction in the Fidelity account.
3. If this is not moving all the transactions if is more problematic that things can at least get confusing.

Jim_Harman

The Direct Connect issues with Vanguard have been resolved.

Gary R

Chris—-The portfolio register has a gear on the top right==There is no option to move shares there

Where are you looking?

Gary R

I see it—-I was looking at the wrong thing

Gary R

Let's please close this discussion——Thank all for their suggestions

I won't be commenting about this anymore.

Gary R

Jim—I had other issues with Vanguard and three weeks with no support from Vanguard was the final straw.

I spoke with a couple Vanguard tech support agents that were not familiar with Quicken—Just lost my patience

Gary R

I need to make one more comment about Chris suggestion:

Moving share between accounts was very simple. I clicked on my holdings, wrote the tickers, and entered the transactions individually (move shares between accounts) Easy Peesy

I tried Chris suggestion and went to one account, clicked on the gear, move transactions

The first account went back 20 years with every entry ever recorded. I would have to spent hours just finding and checking the boxes to move to Fidelity. Dividends, interest, and everything else going back forever

All I wanted to accomplish was moving the shares over to Fidelity. Maybe Chris suggestion would be fine for someone with just a few transactions in the Vanguard account.

OK—Now I'm finished!

Chris_QPW

I don't understand this statement:

The first account went back 20 years with every entry ever recorded. I would have to spent hours just finding and checking the boxes to move to Fidelity.

The point was to move every transaction in that account to the Fidelity account, which can be done by just selecting "Select All".

When done, the Vanguard account is deleted, because it is empty. The result is as if you never had a Vanguard account, and these transactions were always in Fidelity. And yes, the transactions that were originally in the register and the new transactions will be intermixed for the past transactions, but that shouldn't matter.

Gary R

Chris—Your post was not clear to me. I thought I had to check off just the open securities in Vanguard. I didn't realize that the Vanguard account would be gone forever.

Honestly, I'm afraid to try your suggestion to merge the accounts. If anything goes wrong, then I'm really screwed. I still like to be able to view my closed Vanguard accounts if I ever need to go back and check something.

Chris_QPW

That's what backups are for. But certainly, it is up to you. If you aren't comfortable with it don't do it.

But should also mention that besides Select All there is Select Open Positions.

If you think about it that is sort of what Transfer Shares is doing. With Transfer Shares it finds all the open positions and does a Remove Shares in the original account and then an Add Shares in the "To account" for each open security position.

The difference between that and Move is that it would move these open positions to the "To account" as if they happened in that account instead of the original account. This is a sort of in between operation.

But I will say of all of these operations the Move "Open Position" seems the most risk with the not much benefit. But by "risk" I just mean that Quicken might not do it right (then again Transfer Shares has problems too or most of this thread wouldn't be here). In all cases if something goes wrong you can restore from a backup. Which brings up the statement that I hope before all of this you did make a backup. You certainly wouldn't want to use Move after you have already used Transfer. You would want to do it with a copy of the data file before any of this.

One of the main reasons I prefer Move over Transfer is that all of Quicken performance numbers like "Return YTD" are still accurate with Move, but not with Transfer.

With Move "Open Positions" I don't know if you would get correct performance numbers for everything.

Note as far as tax cost basis goes, they should all work for that to be correct.

Gary R

OK—Clear and concise explanation. I already closed the four Vanguard accounts. Let's say I want to experiment with moving shares from one Vanguard account to Fidelity.

I know I can simply delete the remove shares in Vanguard for each security that occurred on March 6. I would select all since that's what you recommend.

Question—Can this be done since the Vanguard accounts are closed???????

Chris_QPW

Yes, this can be done with the Vanguard accounts closed. This is all internal to Quicken and your data file.