My question is about how and why the average cost of a stock is re-computed after the capital gain distributions of the corresponding fund. I'll give the actual example that confuses me to ground the discussion but I think this is quite general.
Concrete example:
I bought VSP stocks for 62.65$ per unit (say 10 units). In late December, Vanguard has announced the annual capital gain distributions for 2020. The average cost of these same units is now displayed at 65.06$ per unit on my brokerage account (original price of 62.65$ + 2.40$ of capital gain per unit). This is the press release:
In particular, in the above press release, they mention that these amounts have been automatically "re-invested and the resulting units immediately consolidated so that the number of units held by each investor will not change".
Questions:
Shouldn't capital gain distributions lower the average unit cost rather than increase it? I would have expected my new average cost to be 62.65$ - 2.40$ = 60.25$ per unit.
How is this updated average cost going to impact me in practice? Since the transaction had already occurred (10 units for 62.65$ each), now that they compute they were "bought" for 65.06$ each, am I owning a debt towards Vanguard?
What does it mean to have the additional units (from the reinvestment) "consolidated" with the original units?
When I sell, I'll just sell the 10 units for the current market price of the stock, so what does it matter that the average cost was updated?