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Posted by Jeff on April 15, 2007, 12:03 pm
Please log in for more thread options John Pollard wrote:
> Don in San Antonio wrote:
>> John Pollard said the following on 4/14/2007 8:35 PM:
>>> Don in San Antonio wrote:
>>>> When I download transactions from one of the financial
>>>> institutions I deal with, there is a placeholder
>>>> transaction for each stock I own included in the
>>>> download. This placeholder transaction is for zero
>>>> dollars an zero cents. What possible purpose could
>>>> these transactions serve? Could they be there merely to
>>>> prevent duplicate transactions from being downloaded?
>
>>> I don't believe financial institutions download
>>> placeholders; actually I don't think they *can* download
>>> placeholders. I think only you, or Quicken, can create
>>> a placeholder in a Quicken investment account.
>>>
>>> If you get a placeholder in your account (other than
>>> after the very first time you download to an account), I
>>> believe that you must have *accepted* it yourself.
>>>
>>> After all the transactions, and your holdings, have been
>>> downloaded, Quicken compares the *holdings* that your fi
>>> downloads to your Quicken holdings. If there is a
>>> difference, Quicken offers to "adjust" your Quicken
>>> account to match the downloaded holdings. You do NOT
>>> have to accept this offer (and if you care about the
>>> accuracy of your data, I believe you should not accept
>>> the offer). I can't tell you what the specific purpose of the
>>> placeholder you are seeing is. Could the account
>>> possibly be a 401k account?
>
>> Good guess on the account type, in this case it's a 403B
>> account. I recall your earlier advice against accepting
>> placeholder transactions proposed by Quicken to balance
>> the account.
>> After reading my original post, I need to clarify that
>> these transactions are for zero dollar and zero "shares."
>> That is, the account is in balance without accepting the
>> placeholder transaction.
>
> I did notice the zero share qualification on the placeholders,
> which was why I said I couldn't tell the purpose of the
> placeholders.
>
> I have read of unusual placeholder activity in 401k accounts
> before though, which was why I thought of that account type.
>
> There are other characteristics of "holdings" besides number of
> shares: for example, in a 401k account, the source of the funds
> is a characteristic of the "holdings". Because of that, some
> 401k account users have seen a placeholder that removes some
> shares from the account, along with another placeholder that
> puts the same number of shares back in the account. The
> underlying purpose of that apparently senseless activity is to
> change the "source" of funds (where the "source" is a mostly
> hidden characteristic of 401k holdings, relating to things like
> employee contribution, employer contribution, rollover, etc.
> There are either 7 or 9 such sources. And I believe that
> strange activity only occurs if the fi reports a different
> source than Quicken has, which does not often happen.
>
> When the underlying information is difficult-to-impossible to
> see, analysis becomes problematic. The more so in your case.
>
> You're the first person I can recall who reported placeholders
> for zero shares, and I really don't know what characteristic
> they are triggered by.
>
> If you were feeling energetic, you might poke around in the
> holdings area of the OFXlog to see what characteristics were
> downloaded for each security. No guarantees of any
> enlightenment though.
>
> In any event, I would still not accept them as I suspect they
> will, like other placeholders, affect other transactions.
I have not followed this thread but I have on occasion had placeholders with
zero shares. Usually they turned out to be because at some earlier date
there was a placeholder for those shares that had been ignored. Searching
through the register finds them. But sometimes it was for no reason I could
find. I would delete these zero share placeholders and they would stay
removed.
Jeff
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