Confusing "Placeholder Entry" for stock

Posted by sackrifice on September 12, 2009, 8:54 am

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A couple months ago I bought 200 shares of GE and just sold them. The
quicken 2009 download registered it as a sale of 201 shares. There was
a reinvested dividend of 1.61551 shares on 7/30. I think the sell got
rid of 201 shares, some fractal amount is left?

The main thing I don't get re quicken is why there is a placeholder
entry for -0.00049 shares. In the same trx it says "placeholder entry
for holdings amount of201.61551 shares. I don't have a clue what to do
with that.

Is this the best place for these kinds of questions? These ng used to
be very active but traffic seems to have fallen off drastically.

Posted by R. C. White on September 12, 2009, 10:41 pm

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Hi, sackrifice.

As we say so often here, this is a 2-step transaction:

Step 1: Understand what happened in the Real World.

Step 2: Record THAT in Quicken.

Trying to do Step 2 before Step 1 will just get you in trouble and you'll
have to start over.

> There was

> a reinvested dividend of 1.61551 shares on 7/30.

You won't be able to properly record what happened until you understand this
dividend and how it affects you.

I also bought some shares of GE in June, but I didn't receive that dividend.
GE's Dividend History web page
(http://www.ge.com/investors/stock_info/dividend_history.html ) does not
show any such dividend on 7/30, although there was one, for 10 cents cash
per share, paid on 7/27/09. Were you holding your shares in an account with
instructions to automatically reinvest any dividends received? At $0.10 per
share, 200 shares would have entitled you to $20.00 cash dividend. The
market value was about $13 per share, so $20 might have bought 1.61551
shares at that time. And you MIGHT have 0.61551 shares left, at a basis of
about $13 per share or about $8. Your basis for the 1 share sold (in
addition to the original 200 shares) would have been about $12, giving you
little or no gain or loss for that one share.

If you tell us more about that "reinvested dividend", we may be able to help
you understand what actually happened.

I also have noticed that traffic here - and on just about all of the dozens
of newsgroups I follow - has fallen off a lot recently.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(Retired. No longer licensed to practice public accounting.)
rc@grandecom.net
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Using Quicken Deluxe 2009 and Windows Live Mail in Win7 x64)

> A couple months ago I bought 200 shares of GE and just sold them. The

> quicken 2009 download registered it as a sale of 201 shares. There was

> a reinvested dividend of 1.61551 shares on 7/30. I think the sell got

> rid of 201 shares, some fractal amount is left?

> The main thing I don't get re quicken is why there is a placeholder

> entry for -0.00049 shares. In the same trx it says "placeholder entry

> for holdings amount of201.61551 shares. I don't have a clue what to do

> with that.

> Is this the best place for these kinds of questions? These ng used to

> be very active but traffic seems to have fallen off drastically.