@Ray posted an idea about corporate mergers inspired by the (inadequate) downloaded transactions from his financial institution (FI). In the discussion about his idea, he asked:
What transactions are needed to correctly enter the transactions?
Rather than clutter debate out his idea answering that question, I thought it better to present what I believe to be the correct approach for such situations. Primarily, I do not trust any FI to get the downloads for these types of events correct for my Quicken files. To often, their downloads ignore multiple lot holdings and fail to include cost basis and acquisition dates.
- Backup your file
- Review what happened in the real world. Not just your FIs transactions but how the companies present the deal. You need to understand what really took place (IMO).
- If you have downloaded transactions from an FI, delete them. If there is a cash-in-lieu cash transaction, take note of the amount.
- In the transaction list for the applicable account, use the Enter Transactions button to initiate the Corporate Acquisitions (stock for stock) action.
For this case, Avalonbay (AVB) shareholders received 2.793 shares of Vivmark (VMRK) for each share of AVB in the account. This would become:
Quicken (and Yahoo Finance) had the closing price for VMRK on 8/17/26 as 63.66 and I used that value on the form.
I simulated the information from @Ray as three lots totaling his 37 shares with an aggregate basis of $7070.57 into three lots, just to be more complete.
After the Enter/Done, the Quicken generated the following transactions dated 8/17/26:
Those include a Remove Shares of the Avalonbay holding, and three Add Shares of the VMRK holdings. One can see that the basis of the three new VMRK tracks with the basis and acquisition dates of the Avalonbay lots.
5. The final transaction is to sell any fractional share for the cash-in-lieu amount received. I don't know the details in this case, but that might be something like selling 0.341 shares of VMRK for a price around $66/share = 22.51. Depending on which actual lot was sold, the may be a small capital or loss associated with that cash-in-lieu payment. The user should attempt (in most cases) to use have Quicken use the same lot as the FI.
That is how I believe a Quicken user/investor should manage corporate mergers and acquisitions.
Further to this case, the other side of the deal is that Equity Residential (EQR) shareholders were also impacted. In their case, it was a 1:1 share exchange. Closer to reality, Equity Residential actually acquired Avalonbay and then renamed itself to Vivmark. So the EQR shareholder has two reasonable paths in Quicken (user preference in my opinion):
- The same type of Corporate Acquisition as above, or
- Rename their Equity Residential security to Vivmark and change the ticker (EQR to VMRK).
