Fidelity NetBenefits transaction download is all "Unidentified Security" (edit)

Thank you!

I allocate about 2 hours every Saturday morning trying to fix problems with Quicken. So many freaking bugs and do not get me started on Fidelity Netbenefits issues. I need to just find a different application.

I have the same issue. My Fidelity Netbenefit tracking is a mess. It was correct until sometime this summer, but a similar issue had occurred a year or so ago - suddenly all the investments have a "2" at the end, some disappear from my portfolio, and my account portfolio only shows a couple securities. The transaction history is all there, but the names of the securities keep changing.

This is happening to me too and I'm tired of manually updating the downloads. It's especially amusing since Quicken is calling out their special relationship with Fidelity on the Quicken loading screen.

Thanks for the update, BarryMo! I pulled up my Quicken yesterday and realized I hadn't opened it for a month. And sure enough immediate face planted into the complete mess this situation makes of my investments once I let a download occur. I backed things out and have cut my online connection to Fidelity but this is ridiculous. It's obviously a problem on the Fidelity end because of the complete switch out of security IDs. I can see where they changed in July without any rationale for the shift.

Yes, I will email. I do have to say that I am disappointed in Fidelity. I used to find them to be a professional company that was committed to quality control. They valued accuracy, paid attention to detail, resolved issues quickly and were committed to being 'best-in-class'. Sadly, seems the sign of the times. People, in general, are slipping and standards are lowering because everyone is in such a hurry.

Thank you BarryMo and Garry Hout for your diligence.

Can Quicken product team explain how the security matching works? Apparently it's not based on the ticket symbol. Maybe there is a workaround before the product team provides the fix.

EDITED changed "code" sections to images to avoid this forum's formatting.

Based on what was reported here:

And this:

I thought it might be interesting if not that helpful to add a bit more to the technical details.

Here is a transaction from a QFX file, you can get the same kind of information from Quicken's OFX log file after doing a download from Fidelity:

Now farther down there is sort the "summary" section and in that section is the security list. I have put a part of it below:

This is how Quicken connects the security in the transaction to the CUSIP that will be used for matching in the rest of Quicken.

Clearly if the two different sections don't line up then there is no way for Quicken to properly identify what security is used in the transaction.

Note that this "Summary section" not being handle correctly is also the cause of the doubling of the cash balance in Quicken when using Fidelity/401K/Simple investment mode (many threads on this since the Simple investment mode was introduce in Quicken).

It really seems like the Fidelity people handling the 401K backend should talk to the Fidelity brokerage backend people, because as you can see none of this is a problem in the non-401K accounts.

Here is some more information that hopefully will clear up a bit of the confusion. First off, nowhere in the QFX/downloaded data is the ticker included. It isn't considered a reliable unique Id because different securities can in fact have the same ticker.

On the other hand, Quicken's third-party service only works off of the ticker, not the CUSIP ID. (side note just so people know, the QIF format always uses the ticker).

So, it seems like you have an impossible barrier here for getting the security prices. But that barrier is resolved using what was explained above and knowing all the possible ways that Quicken can get a security price.

The first is manual input either directly into the security price or in a manually entered transaction.

The next way Quicken gets a price is from the third-party quote service where you have told (or it looked up) the ticker and is stored in that security information on Quicken.

So, for this one, on the first download of a security, Quicken asks you to match the CUSIP ID to a security it knows about, which links it to a ticker.

The last way Quicken gets a price is in the downloaded data from the financial institution.

If you look at the second screenshot of the security list you will see that it includes the UNITPRICE, that is the security's price.

The only part that remains is what to do when it gets prices for different sources. Quicken gives each a different priority to try to make sure that the most current one is used. In the case of the private securities in a 401K you basically only get the prices from the UNITPRICE in the downloaded data.

I hope all of this makes it very clear that with investment data especially, it isn't just the individual transactions that matter there is a lot of extra data that all has to be consistent. "Complete investing mode" uses certain parts of this data, and "Simple investing mode" uses other parts.

I would say that might be a good guess. For things like this to support customers all over the country they have to have many servers and the changes could be pushed out over time. Just recently Chase broke the Web Connect/QFX file (missing/incorrect information in it), it still worked for me a week after the first people started reporting it, but then finally was broke for me too.

I received a call from Fidelity stating they hope to release a fix on November 2nd.

I am not sure if anyone else has had any similar conversations.

I also asked what type of testing did they do to ensure the fix will address the issue. The individual was not able to directly answer. I also asked how should we handle any downloaded transactions but not edited or deleted or accepted ? The individual was not able to say exactly how all the incorrect transactions would be rectified. Hopefully more to come … but if anyone has any additional info it would be great to share.

Based on my test of live data it would seem it is not correcting past downloaded transactions. It will still need to be manually corrected. Unless someone has an ingenious hack on how to get Quicken to download history and have Quicken treated like new download transactions.