Placeholders for "0" shares

wrote

My only knowledge about placeholders for zero shares is in regard to 401k accounts that download transactions.

Does that apply in your case?

Yes.

My apologies: after looking again, I think I may have misread your post when I first replied.

Just in case you really do have the issue I was thinking of:

Quicken 401k accounts that are setup for downloading, allow for a transaction characteristic Quicken calls "Cash Source". There are about 7 cash sources, the most familiar being "employee pretax contribution" and "employer match". When you have a 401k account setup for downloading, you should see a "Cash Source" button on the investment account transactions to which it applies (in the "Enter Transactions" or "Edit" transaction dialog). The button is just below the "Enter transaction:" text in the upper left of the dialog box.

Quicken keeps track of your holdings by cash source (though I don't know that the cash source of Quicken holdings is visible anywhere).

Financial institutions can (and I think, usually do) download the cash source with the 401k account holdings they download. When the cash source of the downloaded holdings doesn't match the cash source of your Quicken holdings, Quicken wants to create placeholders to correct the difference. The correction consists of one placeholder to remove all shares of the security with the "incorrect" cash source, and a second placeholder to add all the shares of that same security back with the "correct" cash source.

You end up with the same number of shares (and the same lots), but the resulting shares (holdings) have a cash source that matches what your financial institution downloaded.

Assuming that the financial institution's downloaded holdings reflect the correct cash source, you'd probably have to modify your Quicken transactions to have the correct cash source before Accepting the downloaded transactions, to avoid being offerred a placeholder (or avoid the Compare to Portfolio - see below).

If the fi's downloaded holdings have an incorrect cash source (and that has been reported by at least one user), you should be able to either refuse the placeholder(s), or turn off the Compare to Portfolio that Quicken does right after you accept downloaded investment transactions. [Select the account in the Online Center, click "Options", and uncheck "Compare account portfolio after download".]

That seems to be precisely my problem. Thank you.

I encounter 0-share place holders when the name of a security is changed. For instance, some time ago Vanguard split its Total Stock Market (TSM) shares into Total Stock Market Admiral and Total Stock Market Investment shares. I changed the name of my TSM shares to Total Stock Market Admiral.

Quicken reacted by adding two trans actions: one was a fake withdrawl of the 1234 shares of TSM from TSM (original name); the other was a place holder for 1234 shares of the TSM Adminal fund. There was no history for the TSM Admiral fund so there was no cost basis. Quicken needs that for reports and capital gains calculations. The place holder is there to get you to enter a cost basis.

Thank you.