Recover from Dumb Investment Account Actions

I had an account with Waterhouse with multiple shares of diverse stock. I decided to dump them in favor of Ameritrade a couple of years ago (ironic since they ultimately merged). I don't remember why, but in Quicken I created the Ameritrade account and added the existing shares of stock as if they were straight acquisitions (shares added) instead of transferring the shares from the Waterhouse account. I still have the original share history in my Waterhouse account. My Quicken account shows about twice as many shares of stock because of this; at least I think it does, when I do a security report on a single stock it will show the transactions from both accounts but the total shares cell is blank. The share numbers appear in the column, they just won't total.

My idea is to delete the transactions I used to put the original stock amounts in the Ameritrade account, then do a transfer all shares transaction to move the shares from the Waterhouse account as of the date they actually transferred.

Will this work? Will it screw up my share numbers? The fact that the share numbers won't show up in the security report is kind of unsettling. I tried to customize the report to show the share totals, but I can't find any customization that would turn on summarization for any particular column that is already visible.

Reply to
BW
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A bit more elaboration is necessary: did you do one Add Shares for each "lot" held in the Waterhouse account? Or one Add Shares for each security held in the Waterhouse account.

Your Quicken "account" ... or your Quicken "file". There are two Quicken "accounts" involved, are there not?

If you neglected to "remove" shares from the old Waterhouse Quicken account, then you should expect to see "about twice as many shares" of your securities.

What is a "security report"?

A Quicken "Shares transferred between accounts" transaction is really a pseudo-transaction; it creates one "Add Shares" transaction in the TO account for each lot held in the FROM account, and one "Remove Shares" transaction for each security held in the FROM account (and transferred to the TO account: all securities, in your situation).

If you had used the "Shares transferred between accounts" originally (and assuming it was used in a Quicken version that did not have any bugs associated with that transaction), that would have been one of two ways to accomplish your goal (the other way would have been to simply change the name of the Quicken account).

Since it is now a bit late to just change the name of the Waterhouse account to Ameritrade, I'd say the Shares transferred between accounts is just about the only way to get where you want to go.

However, if your original "Add Shares" transactions were done on a per-lot basis, you have already done the bulk of the work of a "Shares transferred ...." transaction; all you'd have left to do was to enter one "Remove Shares" transaction into the Waterhouse account for each security held there.

If your Add Shares transactions were one-per-security, then I suspect that deleting them, then doing the "Shares transferred ..." is the best way.

Again, not knowing the specific report makes it hard to comment on this, but I know of no way any report could be customized to create a total to a column not provided out-of-the-box.

A report that should always report share totals is the Portfolio Value report, which you can subtotal by account or security (where "security" is the default, described as "Don't subtotal").

[Depending on your Quicken version, it could be cumbersome, to very cumbersome, but you could also export Waterhouse to QIF, then import that QIF file to the Ameritrade account. But you'd still have to delete the Add Shares transactions ... so the QIF file approach would probably be more work.]
Reply to
John Pollard

I think the latter since each "lot" for the new account share adds has a much later date than the original purchase lots and there is only one lot per security in the new account. I forgot to add that I am using Q2006 Basic.

I meant the Quicken file.

Right click on the security in portfolio view then click "securty report".

Thanks! It worked perfectly.

I think I'll have to go the delete shares then transfer from the old account route.

Reply to
Brian Whiting

I completely forgot to add, the new investment account has an associated cash account but the old investment account did not. The transactions that initially loaded shares into the new account were modified by Quicken when I added the cash account to link them in some way to the cash account. Each of the existing original stock add transactions in the new investment account has a memo that says "TOA FROM NATIONAL INVESTORS SERVICES CORP SD

03/09/2004 0044". I did not put the memo in so Quicken must have altered the transaction when the cash account was created. How will this affect the outcome of the stock share move?
Reply to
Brian Whiting

I don't think Quicken modified the memo of your Add Shares transactions; especially not as a result of you specifying a linked cash account. The memo looks to me like it came in a transaction downloaded from your new broker; it's exactly the sort of text I would expect to see when my broker downloaded the Add Shares transactions for the new securities I transferred to their custody. [When my Legg Mason holdings were transferred to Smith Barney, I downloaded one Add Shares transaction from Smith Barney for each security held at Legg Mason; the memo field in each transaction said "Xfr From: Legg Mason Brokerage".]

I do not think that deleting Add Shares transactions will have any effect on the linked cash account; there is no "cash" involved in an Add Shares transaction.

The only possible problem I can think of in deleting the Add Shares transactions might be if there have been sales of shares in lots added by the Add Shares transactions. I don't recall what should happen in that situation (it may call for deleting and re-entering the Sell transactions), but in any event, I would be sure I had a backup before I started the process.

Reply to
John Pollard

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