Duplicate Securities not Detected nor Merged - Toolbox Help
I recently noticed that my 401k investment account has created duplicates of the primary investment security, "Vanguard Target Retirement 2035 Trust Select."
When viewing Securities Detail, I see three versions of this security. One version goes back to 2016 and is the "right" security. It has my notes of when I created the account, etc. It also has a Security ID of "^[alphanumeric string]." The two duplicates have the same Security Name, but the Security ID for both is "^Vanguard Target Retirement 2035 Trust Select." Both of the duplicates are listed as Stocks under Edit Security. One of those duplicate securities has 6 transactions in the Sep 2023 time frame, which is when the original security's history ends. The other duplicate starts in Nov 2023 right after duplicate #1's final transaction. It appears to be the active security today.
I have always updated this account by OFX download, and I've never told it to create duplicate securities. As far as I can tell, the OFX download process created them on its own.
Now I'm trying to merge them. Toolbox reports no duplicates detected, but it also lists "Vanguard Target Retirement 2035 Trust Select" three times, each reporting that it appears only 1 time. I tried changing all 3 to the same Security ID and also to Mutual Fund > Balanced/Targeted, but Toolbox still detects them as different securities. Is there something else I need to edit to make Toolbox see these as duplicates so that I can merge them? To make matters more confusing, Tools > Securities Shows 6 copies of this security!
Analysing Investment Account: Retirement Fidelity Investment
... Security 'Vanguard Target Retirement 2035 Trust Select' appears: 1 times...
... Security 'Vanguard Target Retirement 2035 Trust Select' appears: 1 times...
... Security 'Vanguard Target Retirement 2035 Trust Select' appears: 1 times...
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1 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 18 Jul, 2024 08:58 PM
From memory:
The IDs must be different,
and the following must be the same
- ticker - decimal places - prefix / suffix - currency - current price - splits
2 Posted by Ted on 18 Jul, 2024 09:25 PM
Thank you. I've given them different Security IDs, the ticker on all 3 is blank, prefix is blank, suffix and currency are the same. I copied the current price to all 3, and there are no splits. Toolbox still detects it as 3 separate securities.
As it turns out, I'd forgotten that Fidelity/Vanguard made a change in Sep 2023 where all of my shares in the security were exchanged out and then exchanged in to a security with the same name but double the NAV. So technically there should be two of this same security, one with the ~50 NAV and one with the ~100 NAV. I'd like to figure out how to get securities #2 and #3 merged because there was no intervening change that should have caused it to be a new security. I might have accidentally hit "none of the above," but I doubt it.
Anyway now that it involves only 6 transactions, I'll probably manually change the 6 from #2 to #3, delete #2, then rename #3 something like Vanguard 2035 Fund #2. Of course the register seems to list the securities in a different order than the Securities Detail tab, so I'll rename first, manually move 6 txns, delete security #2, and then completely forget this in 6 months :-)
3 Posted by Stuart Beesley ... on 18 Jul, 2024 09:52 PM
Ticker cannot be blank. It must be set and all the same.
4 Posted by Ted on 18 Jul, 2024 10:35 PM
Thank you, I'll try that next time.