Reconciling Fideltiy IRA with FM sub-portfolio

[lite1]

The Fidelity website page for Open Positions when for example a mutual fund is expanded showing tax lots, Fidelity inaccurately treats dividend distributions that are immediately re-invested as having a zero cost basis. The customer rep indicated that their supervisor said that most clients are not concerned about cost basis in an IRA. My reply was that if you don't have accurate cost basis you don't have a chance of having accurate performance tracking and are hampered in making decent investment decisions. My question is does anyone have a quick workaround to make sure that one's FM sub-portfolio matches the Fidelity website information?

While I am new to FM, in general I trust it and trust my manual entry of various transactions. Since my total number of shares matches Fidelity and total current value matches, I am in reasonably good shape overall. Because of the differences in cost basis, Fidelity overstates the gains (which I guess is in their favor as it makes for erroneously happy IRA customers).

My hunch is that I will just have to live with this Fidelity insanity and use a calculator now and then to do a thorough reconciliation. Alternatively I could stop automatic dividend re-investments, let them go into my cash account, and then make an actual purchase quarterly when I rebalance the portfolio. Setting up a bunch of portfolios with FM from three different brokerages makes it clear to me that many of the brokerages make some pretty poor choices that do not serve customers! By contrast I am quite pleased with most of the choices that FM has made and its receptivity to feedback and suggestions.

[Mark]

Hi lite1,

You can of course still reconcile the share balance by using the regular reconciliation process in Fund Manager. If you'd like to reconcile the cost basis of those shares however, I don't see any work-around assuming you don't want to record them in Fund Manager the same way Fidelity is reporting them.

[lite1]

Thanks Mark - I have not used FM reconciliation yet and will read about that. After several calls to Fidelity it seems that they have been aware of their mis-reporting of cost basis and have what seems like a 24 month long project to roll through people's accounts and fix the history and going forward it will be correct. I got them to accelerate my account on the list and this will be a non-issue for me in less than a week. If anyone else using FM and with a Fidelity IRA has read this far, I'd suggest emailing Fidelity and politely but forcefully let them they need to fix things for you (or perhaps you will consider moving your account).