This actually makes sense to me. If you purchased a bunch of shares over time and then sold some shares using average cost basis, the brokerage would do exactly what you ask, average the cost of all the lots that you own and use that to create a new basis for all your lots. The averaging happens when the shares are sold. If you then buy more shares, they average lot basis calculated again when you sell some shares.Just wanted to add one datapoint to confirm that YES, the cost basis can be fixed on already-purchased index funds from many years past, as long as you've never sold any.
The problem is that there really isn't any way for them to reconstruct what the basis would be for individual lots because the basis has already been averaged. Since the OP never did make any sales, the averaging never took place so Schwab was able to simply change the way the calculations would be made in the future for all the lots in the account.
Statistics: Posted by WeakOldGuy — Thu Feb 22, 2024 6:23 pm
