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How to deal with investment asset transfers between brokerage accounts?

Will Fiveash

Recently, I initiated a transfer of all investment assets from accounts in brokerage X to new accounts in brokerage Y. My plan for dealing with this in Quicken Classic for Mac is to create the new brokerage Y accounts in Quicken but disable downloads for those new accounts and manually add a transaction in the old brokerage accounts to transfer all shares to the new accounts.

My question is how to deal with the older brokerage X accounts; should I continue to allow downloads for transactions in those accounts or should I also disable downloads to prevent whatever type of transactions the old brokerage creates when the actual transfer occurs?

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Accepted answers

NotACPA

IF you moved everything, why not simply disconnect, in Q, the existing account from downloads and then re-connect to the new brokerage? After all, from your perspective, it's all the same account.

If you'd like, you could input a $0 transaction with a note in the Memo field re: the change.

All comments

NotACPA

IF you moved everything, why not simply disconnect, in Q, the existing account from downloads and then re-connect to the new brokerage? After all, from your perspective, it's all the same account.

If you'd like, you could input a $0 transaction with a note in the Memo field re: the change.

Will Fiveash

While I see the appeal of keeping the existing transaction entries while also getting new transactions from the new broker Y, won't there be an issue when I download a bunch of transfer transactions, or however broker Y categorizes the transfer of shares, from the old broker?

MontanaKarl

Just delete those after they download.

MontanaKarl

@Will Fiveash

The recommended method if you do want all transactions to date kept in the old account (to match the 1099, e.g., - although due to ex-dividend dates, some dividends will trickle in after the transfer)…so you can keep downloading into the old and new accounts…

Use the "Transfer Shares" action in the old account and select "All Securities" as shown in this screenshot. A Remove Shares will be created in the old account for each holding (total, all lots), and an Add Shares will be created in the new account… with the Date Acquired set to the original account's basis date so that long/short term gains are still recognized properly.

I do, however, recommend that you create a backup before doing any of these methods so that if you are not satisfied with the result, it is easy to undo. (Presumably, deleting all of the Remove Shares and Add Shares would get you back to where you were, but I'm always extra cautious for major edits.)

Screenshot 2026-09-24 at 11.30.52 AM.png

Will Fiveash

Thanks, makes sense. Another question; should I go ahead and do the disconnect/re-connect of the existing investment accounts now before the share transfer is finalized in both broker accounts? What I see now is that there are no transactions related to transfers on broker X website and on broker Y, there are pending transfer transactions. I'm assuming that if I do the disconnect/re-connect now I will need to make sure that any new transactions not related to the transfer of shares on the broker X website are manually entered into the quicken account. Does that make sense?

Will Fiveash

So I tried keeping the old account and adding a transfer shares transaction to transfer all the shares to the new account but this didn't appear to work normally in that, in the new account portfolio, it showed no holdings even though the Transactions view showed a bunch of add shares. I decided to try the disconnect of the old account and re-connect it to the new broker. This appears to have worked much better.

As an aside, the old account had a bunch of transactions transferred from another broker account and during that process back in 2022 there were a number of issues that required manual entries to get the values to match reality so this may be why doing the transfer all shares transaction didn't work well for me.

MontanaKarl

A shame to hear that Transfer Shares didn't work as it should have … but your conjecture about manual entries makes sense.

Keep in mind that your old, disconnected account, may still receive some income that now will not appear in Quicken. An option is to create a temporary new brokerage account and re-connect it (after the brokerage has completed the transfer), to download those transactions. You can then multi-select them and drag them into the main account … and later (beginning of new year), disconnect the temporary account and either hide or delete it.

Reconciling will be interesting until it all settles down. :-)