Fractional Shares Appeared For Previously Eliminated Holding

[B2B_Investing]

Hi Mark,

I have a bunch of old positions that I had fully sold years ago that recently starting showing fractional holdings that are prohibiting me from reconciling the accounts. (Most of the errors are <$10.)

In one of the FM upgrades this year I suspect I moved too fast through setting up something that has thrown things off. (Probably around retrieving splits for price history, etc.) Any thoughts? Any additional information I can provide to help run this down.

Thanks as always for an amazing product.

Jason

[Mark]

Hi Jason,

Try looking through your recorded transactions in the Data Register and the data type "All Transactions", and see if you can find what is recorded incorrectly.

Another option is if you know things were correct as of a certain date, you could restore from one of the automatic backups before this date.

[B2B_Investing]

Hi Mark,

It has taken some digging but I think I have found the common theme. All of the holding that are off are:
(1) stocks
(2) are held at Fidelity
(3) were fully sold

The interesting part is all of the sales were conducted in two transactions. The first sold all of the full shares and the second, a few days later, liquidated the fractional shares. Here is where it gets interesting, the remaining share balance is lower for those stocks with higher prices. (i.e. the stock with a value of $230/share has 0.005 shares remaining while the stock valued at $61/share has 0.176 shares remaining. It is not a linear relationship.

I notice in the transactions that the original transaction and subsequent liquidation is generally pricing out to 8 decimal points which--while may have been happening in the background--is now appearing in the UI. (My earlier transactions are all priced in the UI to 2 decimal places. I wonder if the decimal precision is causing a mismatch between FM and Fidelity? I am noticing that a lot of my accounts are no longer in balance.

It did take a bit to run this down because with FM recording a tiny fractional share remaining after the liquidation at Fidelity, when I retrieved prices/transactions, the system added in dividends for these "partial positions"

Thoughts? How can I best help run this down?

Jason

[Mark]

Hi Jason,

It sounds like the transactions are not recorded with the correct number of shares, for some reason. In order to reconcile, the share balance must match exactly. If you edit a transaction, it should display exactly as your statement showed, probably to 2 or 3 decimal places on the shares. If this isn't the case, you can either correct all the bad transactions, or you might want to consider restoring these investments from a backup, as it sounds like they used to be correct? The bottom line is all your transactions should match exactly with your statements, and then your end share balance will also match exactly, thus allowing you to reconcile.

[B2B_Investing]

Understood Mark that makes sense. So for all of the accounts with the errors I do not enter the transactions manually. All of them are retrieved from Fidelity using FM's "Retrieve Transactions" function. That is where I am confused. What would have caused FM to record so many decimal places while retrieving transactions?

Jason

[Mark]

Hi Jason,

I agree, that is strange. I'm not sure how that could happen. If you'd like to email me one of these investments, I could at least take a look at it. I may not be able to tell much, but it might be worth a look.

[B2B_Investing]

Just a update to those following the thread. Mark helped me find what appears to be most (all) of the issue. He was spot on in his assessment. While I import all of the transactions from my broker, I made a mistake retrieving prices (see below). Many thanks Mark!


Per Mark:
"I can..tell by the memo that it was retrieved from Yahoo (Historical), and not imported from your broker. I'm guessing at some point when using the Professional version you retrieved historical prices, and had on the option to also retrieve distributions, thus this transaction. Notice the memo, and how it is different on this transaction.

When you're retrieving transactions from your broker, you do not want to also get distributions from Yahoo, you'll be double counting... I'm guessing if you just delete that one reinvestment things will hopefully be correct."