Transferring brokers

[bralim]

Dear Mark,
I need to transfer all the holdings from broker A to brokers B and C. By reading the message board it seems to me that i have two options:

1 - the less elegant approach of creating sub portfolios B and C and then manually (click and drag I suppose) moving investments to one or the other sub portfolio B or C. This will not leave any history of the existence of a given investment in A first and then in B as the investment will think it always lived in B hence I lose in transparency/audit-ability. However, i can still compute returns for each investment for their entire life and not only before or after the transfer.

2 - use the transfer between wizard (I am a bit confused on the OOP stuff but I think i need to read it a bit more carefully) to create transfer out and transfer in, have full audit-ability but only compute returns for the entire term i held the securities at the aggregate level and at the investment level only compute returns before or after the transfer date.

Is my understanding correct? Any other thoughts on this matter?

This is my first post so let me compliment you and the team and thank you on a brilliant software. I am a quantitative analyst and evaluating personal investments software for my own personal trading needs, fund manager professional seems miles ahead of the other packages i have been testing so far. This is also due to the very good documentation and this message board. It would be nice to have it on mac and iOS and with a sleeker interface but that is more about form over substance.

Regards,
Paolo

[Mark]

Hi Paolo,

I think you understand your options quite well. Everything you mentioned is exactly correct.

Thanks for the compliments on Fund Manager, glad you're finding it useful.

[bralim]

Hi Mark,
Thank you for your response. Hopefully you can also help with a merger that has happened, I am back-populating my transactions and prices at the moment. G and PG merge and G shares receive 0.975 shares of PG. I have 100 shares of PG already and 200 shares of G. I download all the historical prices for G, then I do a split with 0.975:1 ratio and end up with 195 shares of G, I rename G to PG and now I have two securities called PG for each of the 195 and 100 shares respectively. At this point I can either:
1 - leave as is and maintain the full history and performance for both the 100 and 195 shares of PG, however I will have to deal myself with determining the cost basis of PG when i sell. FM will help with the cost basis of each of the 100 and 195 shares but I will need to put them together and think FIFO' average etc.
2 - I record a transfer of the 195 shares to the 100 shares and then i will only have history (and hence individual performance) for the combined 295 shares from the transfer date onward while for the 100 and 195 shares separately before the transfer date. I will not be able to compute the performance of the combined 295 shares investment from the beginning (ie before the transfer). However the cost basis for the 295 shares will be correct and calculated by FM for me.

Is this correct?
Could I get the best of both worlds and take approach 2 while creating a sub-portfolio named PG that houses both investments with 295 and 0 shares respectively and then have the performance of the 295 shares combined for the whole history (not only after the transfer) by looking at the performance of the subportfolio PG? In this case i guess I would be losing only the individual performance of the 100 and 195 shares separately? How would i go by executing the transfer of brokers we discussed in the earlier post by taking the second transfer approach? Would i just move the subportfolio PG (with both investments) to the new broker pf?

Thank you again.

Regards,
Paolo

[Mark]

Hi Paolo,

I wouldn't bother with the PG sub-portfolio approach. If you choose option 2 to transfer the shares to a single investment, you can still get the combined performance by running a performance report and listing by "Symbol". When you report by symbol, all investments with the same symbol are consolidated into the calculation.

[bralim]

That's even better.
Thank you Mark.
Regards,
Paolo