"Reused" stock symbols

[surendar jeyadev]

Had a interesting 60 seconds figuring out why my portfolio was missing a stock and not adding up.

Many years ago I had Washington Mutual ( and sold before they went off the rails!) and that time its symbol was WM.

Last month, I bought some Waste Management. It did not show up in Fund Manager, even though I downloaded the transaction and manually checked it off. Playing with the "Hide" function, I was surprised to see Washington Mutual appear in the portfolio, with the 'correct' number of stocks (the number of Waste Management stocks) purchased. Then, everything became clear: the symbol for Waste Management is WM!!

I guess this kind of reuse/reassignment of symbols is something Fund Manager cannot be expected to handle. I found that I could just change the displayed name via the Properties dialogue box, but all the old data for WashMu is still there. I can get rid of it I suppose, but would it be better to copy the data file and name it to the new WashMu symbol, but then, will
FM still get confused when calculationg ROIs, etc.?

Also, apart from the prices, the file contains the 'buy' and 'sell' transactions for WashMu. Will
it be okay to get rid of them, too?

Any pointers would be appreicated.

thanks
sj

[Mark]

Hi sj,

When retrieving transactions, FM tries to match up incoming transactions with existing investments based off CUSIP. If no match can be found, then it looks for a match with the symbol instead. It sounds like this symbol match caused your incoming Waste Management transactions to get put into the old Washington Mutual investment.

To fix this I would separate them into 2 investments. You can either do it manually, or delete the existing transactions, change your old WM symbol, and re-retrieve. This is probably the easier fix.

To do it manually, create a new investment for Waste Management. Copy/paste the new Waste Management transactions from the old to the new investment, and then delete them from the old investment. You can do all of this in the Data Register. You can select multiple transactions at once for copy/paste if desired. Basically, you want all the prices/transactions separated into their appropriate investments.

When you're done, make sure the new WM has the correct CUSIP and symbol, and the old WM has a different CUSIP/symbol, so retrieving and updating prices going forward will update correctly. I would also double check that your old WM doesn't have any incorrect closing prices that may have been updated from the retrieve. See the "Prices" data type in the Data Register.