5

I use Quicken to track investments. I'd like to track performance. Here is a situation that feels wrong:

  • I buy stock S for $10/share.
  • I hold for 5 years.
  • I sell S at $20/share and buy S2 for $20/share.

At the moment of sale, Quicken now says S2 has a cost basis of $20/share. However, I originally bought at $10/share and I'm just moving money around. I consider moving from S to S2 a rollover, since I haven't added any outside money. I want to know the performance of my investments based on what I originally invested, not on the last purchase of some particular stock.

This situation is exacerbated because Vanguard has broadened the population of people who can invest in their lower-cost ("admiral") shares, and I am taking advantage. So, essentially, the cost basis for most of my funds will be wiped clean in November 2010. Aggravating.

Advice?

JCotton
  • 806
  • 1
  • 8
  • 19
dfrankow
  • 637
  • 5
  • 10

1 Answers1

2

Hmm, this site says

If you use Quicken, you enter a new transaction of type "Corporate Acquisition (stock for stock)." You put investor shares as the "Company acquired", Admiral shares as the "Acquiring company", and the conversion ratio 0.7997754 as the "New shares issued per held share" number.

Seems crazy, but maybe that's the way.

Edit: This sucks. In the comments, you can see that people have to manually correct the share price for every transaction because of rounding problems.

Edit 2 (Jan 2021): I think a better way to do this is to use Quicken reports that look at investment performance over time in this way: (money you took out) + (present value) - (money you put in). That's reasonable-ish, and already implemented in Quicken. So, I don't use cost basis for investment performance anymore.

dfrankow
  • 637
  • 5
  • 10