sh wrote: I have accounts with Fidelity, Schwab and TRPrice and I download my transactions from each into Quicken. However, each does reinvestments of shares (Dividend, LongTerm, ShortTerm) differently.
Schwab does it in 2 steps: 1) Create a short or long term income transaction, then 2) create a buy of new shares transaction.
Fidelity does it in 2 different steps: 1) Create a dividend income transaction and places "LongTerm" or "ShortTerm" as a comment, then 2) create a buy of new shares transaction.
TRPrice does it as 1 step 1) a Reinvest income into shares transaction.
Which way is the best way to do this? It seems TRPrice's way is the most logical, so why do Schwab and Fidelity do it into 2 steps?
What's the down side to doing it the TRPrice way?
Thanks
Welcome to the wonderful world of online download of investment transactions! Basically totally worthless. The idea is to make things simpler for the end user but as you can see above it makes things harder.
I spoke to Fidelity back when I was concerned about this and their answer was "Well Fidelity has over 200 different transaction types and Quicken only supports a handful", to which I queried, "Exactly, which is why, when you are converting between two different systems, the programmer usually has to perform some mapping. So why aren't you?" which left him speechless for a little while before he regurgitated the standard line above.
Worse yet, Fidelity would handle a 2 for 1 split with a sudden purchase of X shares of stock for $0, which, of course totally messes up your graphs because Quicken uses the StkSplit transaction to adjust for splits in the graphs.
I would give them some pity if the protocol had no provisions for such transactions but OFX provides for them.
Like I said, more trouble than it's worth!
-- Andrew DeFaria Budget: A method for going broke methodically.