Placeholders in QD 2006

"JG" wrote

Isn't two years of history better than 90 days of history?

Not sure how this is a problem.

Can you point to this post?

You can enter it, if you have it available.

Naturally. A placeholder is an "Adjust Share Balance" transaction. It's purpose is to allow you to tell Quicken how many shares you owned on a certain date, when you do not have available the actual historical transactions that make up that share balance. Without the historical transactions, you will never get the data completely accurate, but the placeholder allows you to get as close as possible.

If you delete the placeholder, and there are no supporting historical transactions in the account, the share balance will change. (The number of shares that a placeholder adds to, or subtracts from, an account varies depending on how many shares are accounted for in historical transactions entered in the account. If you have entered historical transactions that account for 100% of the shares owned as of the date of the placeholder, deleting the placeholder will not have any effect on the share balance.)

From what you have said; there's nothing to fix and it's neither Quicken nor Schwab.

Usually the biggest mistake people make is to accept placeholders when they do have the historical transactions available and plan to enter them. When you have the history, you should get rid of the placeholder and enter the history; when you don't have the history, the placeholder works just about as well as any alternative. (You can use Shares Added transactions, but I don't see them as much of an improvement over placeholders in that situation.)