Mistaken trade type...

[tedzo]

Mark,
I did an internet retreive of transactions from my broker. I had 2 transactions- a buy (100 shares, say) and a sell (105 shares, say, due to reinvested gains) of the same fund. FM imported the transactions fine except that the Sell has become a Buy. So, rather than have 0 (zero) shares after the 2 transactions, FM displays that I have twice the original number (205 shares from my example). When I look at the transaction details, the buy and sell are recorded correctly (Up and Down arrows in green and red). But when FM displays the holdings, it shows the wrong value.

Ideas?

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi tedzo,

This sounds strange... Do you maybe have a split transaction recorded after the buy, and before the sell? Is the sell recorded as a negative number of shares somehow?

You can also email me this investment file, and instructions on seeing the 205 share balance.

[tedzo]

Mark,
Thank you for the response.
There are no split transactions. There is essentially 1 buy, 2-3 dividend reinvestments and 1 sell. Let me check whether the sell is recorded as a negative number. I will email the file to you if it is not. (I assume that that both buy and sell should be positive numbers...)

Thanks.

[tedzo]

I verified that both transactions are positive numbers. I have emailed to you the qif file in question. I hope you can figure something out from that.

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi tedzo,

Thanks, I received your QIF file. The problem is the QIF file has the sell recorded for a negative quantity and total, making it essentially a buy. It is imported/reported correctly by Fund Manager. It shows up as a sell of a negative number of shares during/after import. The specific transaction in question looks like this in the QIF file:

D12/27' 7
NSell
YXXXXX
I23.91
Q-236.542
T-5655.72
MtradeInc Trade History
O-17
^

You can see this is a sell of a -236.542 shares. Did this QIF file come from your broker? If this is how it came down from your broker, I'd suggest contacting them to get this corrected.

[tedzo]

Mark,
Thanks for the response.
Thats how the file came from the broker. Perhaps I should try to download again and also talk to them if it happens again.

Thanks for your time.

[Mark]

Hi tedzo,

Interesting... I'm curious, which broker did you download this from?

As an experiment I imported your QIF file into Quicken, and it had a different issue. It imported it as a sell of a positive number of shares, but instead of adding to the cash balance, it subtracted from it. It was like you sold shares, but had to pay in order to sell them. Quicken seemed to ignore the negative sign on the shares, but not on the total transaction amount.

[tedzo]

Mark,
Thank you for the response.

I thought stuff like this was what a standard format (like .qif, though proprietary) was supposed to solve....

Anyway. I downloaded again with the same results. The broker is Scottrade. So, now I could proceed with the import and fix the issue (if you think there is a simple way to do that). Or, I go back to massaging .csv files (I am kind of getting good at it now anyway...

What will it take to fix the problem within FM, post-import?

Thanks.

[Mark]

Hi tedzo,

Sorry for the delay, I missed this reply...

This is easy enough to fix manually, you would just edit the sell transaction, and change it from a negative to a positive number of shares. It should be recorded as a sell of a positive number of shares.