Distinguishing two lots of the same stock

[sollner]

Hi Mark,

I have two main subportfolios in my Master Portfolio, a taxable account and an IRA account. In each of these I have further subportfolios devoted to different investment strategies (newsletters). Occasionally, two newsletters in say my IRA account recommend the same stock. I would like to allocate a certain number of shares to one subportfolio following Newsletter-1 and another number of shares to another subportfolio following Newsletter-2. I think I recall a way of keeping the same stock Symbol but changing the Name of the two lots, say Stock Name-1 and Stock Name -2, so they are distinguishable, but I can't find how to do that anymore. Is such a thing possible? This would allow me to track the performance of each of the newsletters separately by just tracking the performance of its subportfolio.

Thanks,
Gerry

[Mark]

Hi Gerry,

Yes, you can do this. You want to create a separate investment for each holding of that stock, so you can have separate investments/shares. See this:

https://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/faq ... tments.php

[sollner]

Thanks Mark. That helps. However, I don't usually manually make new investments; I let them populate when I download transactions. So, I have a few questions.

Suppose I have 10 shares of IBM with file name IBM.dat in account IRA. I want to have another investment of 20 shares of IBM. So, I create another investment that populates like my current IBM, but I give it 20 shares and change the file name to IBM2.dat. Then I buy 20 shares of IBM in account IRA. So far, so good.
-- What account number, if any, should I list for these 20 shares of IBM? Or for the 10 shares, for that matter. I'm worried that without an account number, prices might not get updated. But with an account number, changes to IBM shares in that account might lead to undesired results, as discussed below.
-- What happens when I download my latest transactions, which will include changes to other investments? I would think that all would be well unless I have bought or sold some IBM. But if I do want to change the number of shares of either IBM lot, I assume I have to do this manually in FM. What change do I need to make so that FM does not adjust the shares for me?
-- Should I check the box to leave these shares out of any account reconciliation?

Thanks,
Gerry

[Mark]

Hi Gerry,

If the 2 IBM investments both belong to the same account, yes, this would be problematic, and you may have to do some manual transaction edits. However, if they are in different accounts, that is fine. New transactions of IBM would go into the appropriate IBM investment, based on account number of the sub-portfolio that each investment belongs in. The account number property on the investment is not utilized here, only the account number on the sub-portfolio matters for transaction retrieve and reconcile.

It sounds like you are using the case where you have these in the same account. In this case, when you retrieve transactions, FM will put new transactions into the first IBM that it finds. If that isn't the right one, you'd have to manually move it afterwards. Reconciling should be fine, as it will group all the shares with the same symbol in the account together when determining the number of shares in FM. Price retrieve will also be fine. The only issue really is new incoming transactions could be put into the investment that you aren't wanting.

[sollner]

Thanks, Mark. That should do the trick.
Cheers,
Gerry