Cal,

The short sells appear to have been the problem. I changed them all to
sell, and the 'phantom' cost basis' have gone away. Good Catch!

Thanks for all your help and advice.

Take care,

Bob

"Cal Learner-- MVP" wrote:

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In microsoft.public.money, bob2246 wrote:

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Note that when you do a File-> Export from Money, the transactions
are ordered oldest to newest, if you read from top to bottom.

Those who read from bottom to top probably have their own
terminology.

Regarding the short sells, the qif was in order of newest to oldest, as this
is how the history appears on the web site. That may indeed explain the
short sells as it would appear that I am selling something that I do not yet
have. I will play around with changing those to sells to see if that makes a
difference.

"Cal Learner-- MVP" wrote:

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In microsoft.public.money, bob2246 wrote:

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I can't say. Was your QIF sorted by date oldest-to-newest?

I would wonder if the problem might be those Short Sells if you have
not yet tracked them down. You might customize an investment
transactions report. On Rows&Columns, select to GroupBy:None.

On the dates, show all dates. OK.

Then sort the report by clicking the Activity column header.
Scrolling thru the resulting report will let you spot the various
types of transactions there.


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No. You should see $0 in that case. What you described would be
available by configuring in the Purchases column.


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Hello again, and thanks for the speedy responses.

Having just gone through and entered about 8 years worth of transactions, I
am positive that all transactions are either buys or sells of some sort or
another. Initial buys are listed as Buys, capital gains or dividend buys are
Reinvests. One strange thing that perhaps I should bring up though. I began
this exercise last month. I went to the web site of the company where my
401(k) is invested, and downloaded all buy/sell activity to an excel
spreadsheet. I then wrote a vb app to take these transactions and transform
them into a .qif file. In doing so, I used only buy, sell, reinvest long
term cap. gains, and reinvest dividend transactions. Upon importing to
Money, a good deal of the sells appeared as Short Sells. Try as I might, I
could not get this behavior to change, except to go through and change each
tranaction manually, which I have not yet done. I checked the investment
activity and cash transactions, and all seemed well so I thought no more of
it. Do you think that this may have some bearing on what has happened?

I will try to go through and see if the sold shares are reflected in the
cost basis. Just so I understand better, is the cost basis indeed what I
spent over the years to acquire the shares? In other words, If I bought 10
shares [at] $10 each, then sold them all [at] $5 each, should I expect to see a $50
cost basis remaining?

By the way, I do have 'Actual Cost Basis' selected for all investments, as
all transactions from day 1 are there.


"Cal Learner-- MVP" wrote:

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In microsoft.public.money, bob2246 wrote:

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I wonder if the problem investments may have AddShares and
RemoveShares transactions. If you were to change those to
appropriate Buys and Sells, do things improve?

Keep an extra copy of your Money file or backup while you are doing
this, in case you do something that you want to undo.


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For cost basis, the amount of basis associated for the shares sold
reduces the total basis. For your US Money 2004, if you do not sell
all of your holdings, the basis is reduced by what you paid for
those specific shares (default oldest shares from that account) and
for funds it is usually one of two averaging methods. If you sell
all of your holdings, the basis should go to zero. If it does not,
look for those AddShares and RemoveShares transactions. So yes, it
is proper to subtract the BASIS of the sells to adjust the remaining
cost basis.

As to what assesses the health of a portfolio best, I like the
collection of Total Return (TR) columns. They include the effects of
dividends.

Hi Cal,

I am replying again because it appears as though my original replay never
made it. Please disregard my original reply, if it ever surfaces.

Yes, I am looking at the cost basis column in the Valuations view. I also
notice that the total figures for Appreciation, and as a result gain, change
as well. The total figures look a lot better with the closed accounts
hidden, as these closed accounts were the stinkers that I had when tech
stocks hit bottom 2000-2002!

I am no expert at this, really, but I think I would need to see all gains
and losses to assess the health of my investment account, i.e. the
Appreciation calculation needs to be the total appreciation of all
investments, open or closed. Secondly, and back to the original symptom,
would it be proper to subtract the 'sells' of an investment from the
investments cost basis? Or am I misunderstanding the definition of cost basis?

Thanks,

Bob

"Cal Learner-- MVP" wrote:

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In microsoft.public.money, bob2246 wrote:

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Just to be sure, is the column you are looking at called "Cost
Basis" and not "Purchases"?

I am using Money 2004 to track my mutual fund investments, among other things.

I had the portfolio manager options set to show closed positions. When
configured as such, the the cost basis from the closed positions was added
into the total cost basis for the investment. In my case, the closed
positions were a result of a non-taxable sell and reinvest into another
investment. Long story short, some money shows up twice in the total cost
basis calculation.

After clearing the option to show closed positions, the total cost basis
calculation appears to be correct.

I would expect to see the same number regardless of this option.