I have several Fidelity mutual funds, and have conflicting views on how the funds are actually performing.
Within Quicken - the divs or cap gains are reported as transaction "div" and then a corresponding transaction for "buy" so - how can I really tell within Quicken how the fund is performing overall ?
Quicken has an alternative - instead of entering two transactions (the div and the buy), use "RD" - "reinvest dividends" transactions. Quicken then knows that you didn't inject any additional money and tracks, separately "amount invested" as opposed to "cost basis".
yeah - sounds good - but of course these DIV + BUY are the transactions being downloaded from Fidelity and others.... Some appear as dividends, some as LT cap gains, etc... It's tough.... when we really didn't inject any more investment capital, but yet, I guess we "did" when we received the dividend payout.
The harder one is with any of the MMF - since the "price/nav" stays at $1.
Couldn't say. I tried downloading transactions once for a credit card and never for my brokerage accounts and decided never again. I enter them by hand and sometimes it does require me to break up pieces and fix them by hand (ie. a bond fund I own recently had three distributions
- in long, short gains and divs - Fido listed three dividends and a single purchase for the reinvestment. I broke the purchse up and entered it into Quicken as three Reinvest transactions (RD, RL, RS)).
Not really. If you reinvested the dividends, your *cost basis* went up, but your return on investment computations require a base number which was capital which came from elsewhere, not reinvestments. Else your "total return" won't look like what (should be) published by the fund over the same period.
I don't bother with total returns on MMFs - I treat them as cash.
I'm not sure if I understand where your concerns are, but I'll throw in what my take is (I have a bunch of Fidelity funds myself).
First I'll say that I use to have the same issues as you do (I think). However, in order to minimize the amount of work in reconciling with the monthly statements, I now use the downloaded transactions as is. It matches up with the statement more readily.
The different type of dividends (div, short term, long term) are necessary because the taxes paid are different for short vs. long term. The BUY is necessary because you are truly buying more of the funds, even if you don't handle it yourself. It would be the same as if you received the dividends transferred in your checking account and then sent the money to Fidelity and bought it yourself. From the IRS standpoint, Reinvesting is a Buy.
WRT how the fund is performing, I look at the ROI. This is (the last I checked) the calculation of ($Return) / ($Invested). It is the total profit if you sold at the market price.
At one point I wanted to know this as well. So I created a Security (e.g. FDRXX) and for each Cash transaction, Div/Int, Sell, Buy, etc. which changed "Cash" I would add a new entry for the MM security. So if I sold a stock and received $100 in the "Cash", I would then Buy $100 of the MM security.
But now I'm too lazy. If I want to know what the interest rate is, the Fidelity statement shows the yield. e.g. for last month, the FDRXX 7-day yield was 5.08%.
I wrote about this at least 7 years ago (See Online Investing Download Problems ). Truth is investment companies like Fidelity don't give a f*ck about you
- just what they can make off of you. Additionally there are some of the most old, antiquated, stoggy and stubborn types of companies that exists. I've worked for a few financially oriented firms and they pay the least and are the most penny pinching. I keep trying to tell them, as a person in the business and who has programmed many system interfacing between two or more similar but not exactly the same systems, it is the job of the programmer to understand all systems involved and to perform the appropriate translation between the two systems. And if I had done as shotty of a job as they have obviously done I would either be fired or my contract would be terminated. I know. I do this for a living and have done so for at least the last 30 years. I'm a professional. Too bad you don't likewise hire professionals. That said, why then would you expect them to make things easier or more modern for you, the lowly customer of whom we rip off to make our money...?
I know all the reasons for the separation of the downloaded transactions, it just makes it tougher to see relative performamce. tnx for the reminder on ROI... now I just have to go find the account ROI in Quicken. I know I stumbled across this same discusssion before, and Pollard probably answered it... have to go search the newsgroup.
For the MMF, I just pull up my Yahoo Portfolio and can see it there. I created the portfolio on Yahoo since Quicken has for the past several months stopped downloading the "news" icons, and I needed an easy way to keep up with the "news" related to each security - without a bunch of mouse clicks per security.
In Investing Center > Portfolio tab there are the different "Views" on the left as "Show:" and bunch of options in the dropdown list. I created my own (on the right side) under the "Options > Customize Current View" where I have the following items:
Name Ticker Symbol Quote/Price Shares Market Value Market Value % Cost Basis Cost Basis % Return YTD ROI (%) YTD ROI (%) 1-Year ROI (%) 3-Year ROI (%) 5-Year ROI (%) Return
I know it doesn't matter whether it's one transaction or two. As I had prefaced in my post, I wasn't sure where his concerns were. The OP mentioned the DIV & BUY transactions. He also mentioned about determining fund performance. He appeared to be confused (to me) about Dividends as regular or LT. Again I wasn't sure where he was confused. So I tried to address all issues. He responded that he understood about the multiple transactions. That's fine. But I did seem to help him with the ROI information and he had a way to deal with his MM funds. So he seemed to be satisfied with my response.
What I didn't understand was your weird discourse. It was of no help to the OP.
adi wrote: The BUY is necessary because you are truly buying more of the funds, even if you don't handle it yourself. Excuse me for saying so but so what! The two transactions can be represented as one transaction in Quicken with no ill effect.
It would be the same as if you received the dividends transferred in your checking account and then sent the money to Fidelity and bought it yourself. From the IRS standpoint, Reinvesting is a Buy.
Again, so what. Having 2 transactions does me no good. One transaction makes perfect sense here.
-- Andrew DeFaria A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. - Douglas Adams
However you said that both where necessary. That is not the case. I was pointing that out. Apparently you have a problem with that. I remain unconcerned...
It's simple. I wish for Quicken to help, not hinder me keeping track of things. Having multiple transactions is more of a hindrance than a help. And there are other things that financial institutions "get wrong" WRT downloading transactions to Quicken. This makes online investment downloads much less useful. So when this subject comes up I point this out to people. I hope they will bitch to the financial institutions and that they will, in turn, make it better. I know it's a long shot because your reprobates probably never take the time to complain to your financial institution to fixed things however that's how it works.
You are running under the incorrect assumption that I'm here to help. I'm not. Get over it.
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