Symbol = CUSIP ID?

[Don_G]

Hi All,

Just installed the program (Pro version) to try it out. After downloading transactions from Vanguard Group, most of the stock symbols being displayed for our investments are numbers and letters, such as "94106L109" for Waste Management, "191216100" for Coca-Cola Company, etc. Why is this and how can it be fixed (we have hundreds)?

Thank you,

-Don

[Mark]

Hi Don,

When you retrieve from your broker (Vanguard in this case), they provide the symbol for each security. The actual transaction retrieve is done by CUSIP, but the name/symbol are normally provided as well. Did you verify under "Investment Properties..." that the CUSIP is being recorded in the symbol field?

If no symbol is provided by the broker, Fund Manager will default the symbol to be the CUSIP, since this is always available. If some of your investments don't have the proper symbol I would suggest turning on logging, and looking at the response from Vanguard to see if it had the symbol or not. Maybe there was a temporary problem, or something, as usually they do provide the symbol I believe.

To enable logging, see "Options / General Preferences... / Other / Create Log Files When Importing Transactions". Log files will be stored in the hidden folder:

C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\Fund Manager

Try going through the New Portfolio Setup wizard again for your account, and afterwards, look at the xmldump.txt log file. If you'd like me to look at it, please email it to me. If you want to look at it yourself, look for SECINFO. You should have one of these sections for each security, and in each one of these there should be a TICKER value, which shows the symbol as reported by the broker (Vanguard).

[Don_G]

Hi Mark,

Did what you instructed. Looked at the file "xmldump.txt". As one example, I found "TICKER (464287200)", which is the same as UNIQUEID, which is the CUSIP. So it appears that Vanguard is NOT transmitting the SYMBOL. Why doesn't Fund Manager perform a lookup on the CUSIP when TICKER = CUSIP, in order to provide us with a valid symbol?

Also noticed that all of these TICKER = CUSIP entries are for zero (0) share count equities. Thus, based on this, and on the other problem I posted, it seems that Fund Manager has problems obtaining full and proper data for any equity (stock, fund, etc.) that currently has a zero (0) position? Which means a LOT of manual data entry.

Thanks for your help,

-Don

[Mark]

Hi Don,

We've not run into the issue of missing tickers before, so looking them up has never been necessary. Normally the broker provides this information.

In your other account and posting you were not seeing any transactions for investments with no current shares. It sounds like in this account, you are seeing all your transactions, but the tickers are missing? If so, a phone call to Vanguard might be worthwhile to ask them if they can improve this.

One easy way to update all your security names/symbols based off CUSIP is to use the "File / Import / Other / Security Properties / Comma Delimited (*.CSV)..." menu command. You can download a CSV file from DST that has all this information. For help/links to the download, see the online help topic for this import command:

http://www.fundmanagersoftware.com/help ... ities.html