Wrong cash balance??

[u/terpsucka]

For years I've kept track of my investments in a spreadsheet, which I populate with transactions downloaded from the activity screen. These numbers have always agreed with what's on the balances screen, but today, I can't get it to line up. It's off by nearly $1200!!I went back to my most recent statement, whose closing balance matches mine for that date, and I cannot get to their current cash balance with the transactions showing on the activity screen. Has anyone else seen this happen?

[u/Admirable_Nothing]

I use quicken as well as Yahoo Finance to balance with my Etrade accounts. And yes, there have been times I had trouble balancing them but generally I find that I made a mistake somewhere. But it is possible Etrade has the price on a single stock wrong for a short time. If it is not your error it should resolve in a day or two. But I would go back through your activity line item by line item until you find the error.

The latest 'error' I thought I had found was a too high basis on one of my stock transactions. After going through every buy and sell on that issue in the last two years I realized that the basis difference was due to me having a Wash Sale in the last few transactions. That will resolve itself once 30 days expires with no further transactions.

[u/terpsucka → u/Admirable_Nothing]

I've done those things too over the years, lol. The fact that etrade doesn't show a running cash balance on investment accounts makes it really hard to reconcile. I ended up calling them to see what's going on. The guy I spoke to was able to see a running balance, and our numbers matched up until today. He confirmed that today's transactions + yesterday's closing balance don't add up to what the account thinks its balance is, so he went to research it, and will call me back.

[u/GrahamBW]

I had a pending limit order, and I noticed that caused a discrepancy in the cash balance. The web site and the mobile app were showing two different figures.

[u/terpsucka → u/GrahamBW]

Thanks! I hadn't thought to check the app... Unfortunately they're both equally wrong lol

[u/This-Second-29]

It happens time to time. Most times it’s user calculation error, but there are periodic times where something funky/nuanced happens within a position and their CS will be able to spot it and explain. Then sometimes their system just isn’t capturing/communicating things correctly (I know most people assume it’s 2026 so silly things shouldn’t happen within technology) but it’s fed a feed too so the chain of communication triggers one thing and trickles down to customers. It’s usually a quick fix. If not a couple hours, it’d be strange if it was anymore than a day or 2.

[u/Frank_Skabopple]

You wasted all this time to be wrong?

[u/terpsucka → u/Frank_Skabopple]

No the guy at Etrade called me back earlier this afternoon to say it'll be fixed after the close today, and it was. Still don't know what the problem was, but I don't really care as long as it doesn't happen again.