Error in my Etrade account!
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So I logged into my brokerage account this morning and almost cried since my total amount went down $4200!
After further examination, here is what I found to be the cause.
| Symbol | Price | Change | Day’s Gain | Qty |
| MO | 67.67 | -20.14 | -$4,260.85 | 211.56151 |
As some of you know, Altria (MO) spinned off Kraft (KFT) after the market closed on 3/30 (last friday) so my brokerage account (Etrade) haven’t updated the cost basis for me while the current price has gone down from the $80s to $60s, creating this error. The other problem with this is that my shares for Kraft are not there yet! I’m at work right now and I don’t want to call the brokerage account and tell them I want to sell my Kraft shares (which I do). I plan to wait a few days for the shares to settle and go back up a little bit though.
This is the second time I have encountered something like this. The other time was when Nvidia (NVDA) did a 2-for-1 stock split and Etrade didn’t update till the end of the business day. I really think this is a problem since it means the account is giving wrong information which could lead some people to make the wrong decision. Does other brokerage accounts do the same thing? What do you think?
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I’m very interested in knowing if other companies (mainly discount brokerage accounts) show these errors too so please comment if you can.
I know what you mean. Same thing happened on my sharebuilder account when one of the stocks had a stock split.
Seems like Etrade is not the only one that does this so maybe I can’t blame them. I ended up joining gainskeeper.com which automatically calculated my cost basis and the splits etc though. It’s quite pricy but it helps a lot at the end of the year when taxes are due.
ET had transferred a bank ira account to roth instead of IRA….so when i asked them to fix it finally with all the documentation (transfer sheet, etc). was i amazed when my account showed i had 8 million dollars in my account more than i had.!!!!
they had transferred thousands of shares of something somewhere! i didnt DARE try to do an extended hour trade.
I was wondering how stock splits show up in other brokerages. I’m using Questrade from Canada and recently a stock I bought had a 3:1 split. The split shows up as additional shares at the “before split” price, so that particular transaction immediately show as having a -$1500 loss for me. I called their support, and they say that’s the way it works. It doesn’t reflect an actual loss. I then asked how I can use their system to see my actual gain/loss for that stock, and he basically said I have to keep track of it myself. Is that how other brokerages work?
Harold: ETrade works similarly but you can manually adjust the price to reflect the split price.
Maybe call tech support and see if they can adjust the price for you.
Thanks for the information. Questrade doesn’t offer the ability for me to adjust it manually, but the tech support did offer to change the price for me. Thanks again.
Harold: No problem. Get it changed before you forget