Active trader doing shorts and covered buys.

Ronald1955

As a active trader ( average 150 Trades per day) I do use Quicken to now only track investment income and stopped tracking cost basis and capital gains on the actual brokerage account. I do use Quicken for normal banking transactions. Quicken does update buys and sells; but the cost basis and capital gains do not match brokerage data.

NotACPA

And, if your not tracking cost basis and CapGains in Q, why would you expect your Q records to match your brokerage statements?

Tom Young

"Quicken does update buys and sells; but the cost basis and capital gains do not match brokerage data. "

I'd expect that with that much trading activity you're frequently encountering wash sales. The broker has the computing horsepower to keep up with this - deferring losses, adding those deferred loses to subsequent sales at a gain, all behind the scenes - something that, from a practical standpoint, is just about impossible to do in Quicken. I certainly wouldn't expect that Quicken cost basis and capital gains would agree to brokerage data.

Boatnmaniac

When investment transactions are downloaded into Quicken they are just simple transactions with no lots information attached to them. So, the inventory method you use in your online account for sell transactions is not downloaded into Quicken.

If you want the cost basis and cap gains/losses in Quicken to track reasonably well with what is shown in your online account you will need to make sure that every sell transaction in both the online account and in Quicken has the same inventory management method applied to them. So if you use FIFO online, then FIFO needs to be used in Quicken. The same goes with LIFO. Or if you manually select each lot to sell with each transaction then you will need to manually do the same in Quicken after the transactions are downloaded. (I don't think Quicken has an average costing method option.)

Given the number of trades that you do and that your cost basis is off I can't think of an easy way to get everything into sync again between your online account and Quicken other than to first sell every holding and then start all over with new investments. But I'm pretty sure that would not be a viable option for you.

NotACPA

Unless you instructed the brokerage differently, at the time you placed the trade, they almost certainly used FIFO for all sales.

Does that help you in straightening out your records?

If not, you'll probably need to go over your statements, trade-by-trade, to figure out which lot was sold.