Investment anomalies?

[Bob Ewart]

On 01/18/2016 08:25 PM, Jack wrote:
> <snip>
> Second issue - on the surface, ML does pretend to track whole shares 
> only, with the occasional transaction (I've forgotten the term they 
> use, and don't have time to go digging into a statement right now) 
> where they add or remove a single share.  I used to try to do it that 
> way in KMM.  However, there really is enough information in all the 
> buy/sell/div-reinvest transactions to track shares at fractional 
> amounts (often to four decimal places) and they actually do report 
> that partial amount in the holdings list in the monthly statement.  
> The month I converted to actually tracking too some "creative" 
> transactions, but now it's much easier to know what I actually have.
>
> Jack
>
When I first started using KMM, ML did report the fractional shares in 
the memo. They don't do that now..  They do  have the name and memo 
fields swapped.  At that time I wrote a little perl program fix the 
fractional shares and the name/memo fields.

Editing the account to fix the name/memo only appears when you're set up 
for online banking.  It should be available for importing from a file.

I did try the online fetch of the ofx data, but ML changed something.  
It's easier to download the ofx file at the same time as my statement.

I get a bunch of dividend-reinvestments every year in December.  So I 
thought I'd update my little fix program.  What should a 
dividend-reinvestment look like in ofx?  I can't find an example anywhere.

The ofx is showing 3 transactions for each reinvestment.

 1. An Income transaction which shows up in the ML account with the
    amount and no change in shares.  It appears in the brokerage account
    as income with the category of 'Investment Transaction'.  That
    appears to be the '_Dividend' category.
 2. A transfer which shows the units and price.  Seems to be ignored.
 3. An INVBANKTRN which causes a payment in the brokerage account with
    no category assigned and not tied to the equity.

My thought is to combine the 3 into two transactions.

 1. An income transaction showing the dividend.  Not sure how to assign
    the category to short-term, long-term or ordinary dividend.
 2. A buy transaction showing the units and total cost (Do I need to
    specify the price/share?)

-- 
Bob Ewart