Placeholder Transactions in the Brokerage Import
[NOTE: This document pertains to both the "direct connect" brokerage import as well as the Advanced Brokerage Import.]
Brokerages often limit the historical transactions that can be downloaded for your account. For example, some brokerages limit the transactions to only those that have occurred in the past 30 days. Others allow 90 days of transactions and some may allow 1 or 2 years of transactions to be downloaded.
Because the transactions downloaded from your brokerage may not be the complete transaction history of your account, those transactions may not cover all of your account’s current holdings. For example, if you purchased a stock 5 years ago, but your brokerage only provides the last 1 year of transactions, no purchase transaction for that stock would be downloaded.
StockMarketEye makes every effort to reconcile the downloaded transactions with the downloaded current holdings, matching purchase transactions with currently held positions wherever possible. However, if the brokerage did not provide matching purchase transactions for a currently held position, StockMarketEye will create a “placeholder” transaction for consistency. For example, if the brokerage only provides 1 year of transactions, but one of your currently held stocks was purchased 5 years ago, StockMarketEye will create a placeholder purchase (BUY) transaction for it.
As StockMarketEye does not have any record of the actual purchase date and purchase price for these stocks, the placeholder transactions must set them to default values. These default values are:
- Purchase Date is set to one day before the date of the first transaction that was downloaded.
- Purchase Price is set to 0.
After import, you should modify the placeholder transactions to set the correct purchase date and purchase price. These fields are used to compute gains and losses, so having appropriate values will allow StockMarketEye to make correct calculations.
The following sections show how you can modify the placeholder transactions to set the purchase date and price to their appropriate values.
What If I Want The Whole History Of My Account?
Unfortunately, brokerages don't provider your entire transaction history if your account is older than their limit (between 30 days and 2 years, depending on the brokerage).
If you want the missing transaction data, you'll need to add it yourself - either manually by adding individual transactions (click on the Buy/Sell/etc buttons on the toolbar); or by importing the data, such as from a CSV file.
- Importing Transactions from a CSV File
- Format of the Transactions CSV File - This page describes the custom CSV format that StockMarketEye expects for transactions.
If your brokerage account is at Charles Schwab, you can import directly from their CSV file format: