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Fidelity Investments IRA Account Inflated by Pending Activity Amount

Tom Auer

For rather obvious reasons, I am not going to share a screen shot. The symptom: my employer was acquired, my former 401(k) rolled over into my IRA, and I have been rearranging investments. The asset amount shown in Quicken is high about as much as the amount of the pending transaction amount in my Fidelity account. I expect this will resolve in a few days, but I do consider this to be a bug.

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Sceptic

I think this is not unusual for Fidelity. This happens because Fidelity sends position information immediately after the trade, and then the cash update later. A few other brokerages do this as well.

Wells Fargo Advisors doesn't have this issue because position and cash updates are sent at the same time.

It is not technically a Quicken bug. It could be considered a design flaw. Quicken is allowing position updates without corresponding cash transactions.

Chris_QPW

It is a bug/design flaw at the financial institution, not Quicken. And yes, this happens for quite a few financial institutions.

There are a few ways I have seen this show up.

Financial institution uses a MMF for "cash", and they send the buys/sell transactions when they happen, but they don't send the transactions to move cash in and out of the MMF until it closes. (I sort of remember Vanguard doing this).
They send the transaction information right after it happens, but don't update the "share summary information" until late at night. (Chase would do that)
And I guess it might be possible for one to send the "share summary information" before the transactions, even though I haven't seen that myself.

One has to understand that with any investment account download the data includes both transaction data and a listing for all your securities with how many shares you have of each security and their price, and also the cash balance if there is one. This last part is what I called "share summary information" above. This "share summary information" isn't "optional, it comes down with every download. Clearly if the financial institution doesn't keep transaction data and this data consistent it is going to show up one way or another in Quicken. Quicken can just the data to be inaccurate and try to suppress it.

In fact, Chase's own web site would show this inconsistency.

And here is how Quicken uses that information.

When using Complete investing mode:

Transaction data goes into the register as you buys/sells and such.

The "share summary information" is used to check if the number of shares for each security match what the financial institution sent. And if not, this where Quicken will start suggesting placeholders to try to make them the same. For people where the transactions come in before the "share summary information" they have to know not to allow the placeholders (actually you should never allow them you should fix the underline problem) and when they download again and the financial institution updates that information it will all balance.

It is important note that with the recent ability to tell Quicken to treat a MMF "as cash" some of these fall away, like #1 case above since the offending MMF transactions are ignored in this case.

When using Simple investing mode Quicken ignores the downloaded transactions and uses the "share summary information" to put in Add/Remove share and MiscInc/MiscExp transactions to make Quicken's share and cash balance match whatever that "share summary information" said.

Chris_QPW

I'm not exactly following what is meant by this statement:

The asset amount shown in Quicken is high about as much as the amount of the pending transaction amount in my Fidelity account.

Where are you looking?

Do you see more shares in given securities than you expect?

Do you see too much cash?

Exactly what about your "assests" is inflated?

The main reason I ask is because depending on what is wrong this may or may not get corrected automatically.

For instance, if the transaction and "share summary information" is out of sync Quicken might have automatically put in some placeholders (there are different modes where they might go in without asking you to approve them). If this is the case the placeholders will not be automatically resolved.

Tom Auer

Sceptic and Chris_QPW, thank you for your thoughtful answers. I am seeing too much money in a Money Market Fund. I am watching to see when this resolves.

Chris_QPW

Yes, that "plays" as the "cash", so it might just be a temporary thing as everything gets closed out.

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