Investment/Portfolio Setup

[BBrehm]

Hi,

Is there a way to combine investments based on the ticker?

I did an initial load of transactions from Interactive Brokers using the downloaded QFX files. This got all of my transactions from 2012 forward but didn't include the base positions that I had transferred to IB at the beginning of 2012. Thinking that I could manually create these I started over and entered the base positions manually (with historical dates from the old broker) then imported the IB transactions. Unfortunately this didn't match and created separate investments. For example I have a manual investment in ADSK for 100 shares and a second for AutoDesk ADSK for -100 shares.

In reading through the posts here and checking the manual it appears that I should have imported everything then used reconcile to get the original data in place. I also tried using the Position Transfer to move the manual transaction to the IB loaded on, which works but doesn't seem to capture the history as well as I would like (and it will still take a while to fix this way).

Thanks,
Bill
(who is hoping to save time but expects the answer is to do it the right way)

[Mark]

Hi Bill,

There is no automated way to combine 2 different investments with the same symbol into 1 investment. Probably the easiest way is to use copy/paste from the Data Register. In the Data Register, set the "Data Type" to "All Transactions", and then display your source investment in the Data Register. Select all the transactions at once. You can do this by selecting the first one, holding down Shift, and selecting the last one. Once all transactions are selected, right mouse click on the selection, and choose "Copy". Switch the display to the destination investment, and right mouse click in the transaction list, and choose "Paste". You can now "Close" the source investment. You can close the source investment by switching back to it in the Data Register, and pressing the "More >>" button and selecting "Close Investment".

One note on default cash... When you use the "Paste" command you will be given the choice of whether or not to apply these transactions to the default cash account. If your cash is already correct, you do not want to do this.

[BBrehm]

Thank you, that saved me some typing.

I would not recommend anyone repeat what I did but if someone does need to manually move transactions around I found it worked best to have the Portfolio Editor window up on half of the screen with the Data Register next to it. The Portfolio Editor helps with navigation in the Data Register and you can use a right click to close the old investment after the transactions have been copied where you want them.

Bill