Delete Expired Option Trades (12 Legacy Votes)

Unknown

Bill Stuart said:

You are 100% correct.   And what is even worse, if you accidentally make the wrong choice, good luck going back and fixing it.    Because of this i have numerous mismatched buys and sells, so my Quicken Security list has become pretty much useless.   Certainly cannot depend upon using it for tax purposes....

Quicken does not provide, or claim to provide, accurate information for tax reporting of investments.
It does not handle wash sales, stock cost basis adjustment when trading options, or other IRS requirements.  If you get audited you will be SOL. 

Unknown

K.O. (Win-Premier) said:

Hi Richard.  I trade a lot of options and have made some options-related suggestions to Quicken before.  A couple comments/questions based on your suggestions.

1. When you're talking multiple securities in 1 transaction are you talking about opening or closing trades (e.g. opening an iron condor - 4 legs) in one transaction or are you talking about the open and closing trade (e.g. BTO and STC) in one transaction.  Even if this was implemented I guess I don't see what the time savings would be over entering multiple transactions via the register because even if there were a way to enter multiple legs at one time you would still have to enter all data for each leg (action, date (which could default to the same date) security/symbol, price, quantity, commission, etc) as for tax purposes each leg is a separate taxable transaction even if though some brokerages will "show" multi-leg transactions as 1 transaction in their trading platform.

2. I think this is kind of already present.  Just click the Add Security Manually link (at the bottom of the window - the name may not be exactly this as I'm doing this from memory) and it won't go through the lookup.  I always set up options manually.

3.  I've made the same suggestion using expiration date as the trigger to ask the user if they want to hide options past expiration date.  I don't think it makes sense to automatically hide them without querying the user because sometimes transactions aren't entered until the day after they expire and if they're automatically hidden the transaction entry is more cumbersome.

4. Challenge here is "typically" as some contracts are not 100 shares so Quicken would need to track the contract specs for all securities or provide some kind of default/override to implement this so I'm not sure it would be a huge benefit.

If you trade options, do not use Quicken for year-end profit loss reporting to IRS. Quicken does not handle stock options per IRS requirements. So be careful of using it for schedule D tax return preparation.  If you are audited you will find out how inaccurate QW is especially when it comes to wash sales. 

Savvy Investor

The Maturity Dates for Bonds and CDs report (2018 Quicken Premier) includes bonds and CDs which I no longer own if their maturity date lies in the future. This can occur because a bond is sold prior to its maturity or because it is called by the issuer prior to its maturity.

This report would be far more useful if fixed-income securities that are no longer owned are excluded.

Admittedly, I am a more active investor than most Quicken users and own multiple portfolios containing more than 100 stocks, bonds, and certificates of deposit. In my case, the Maturity report now shows six fixed-income investments which I no longer own, interspersed with others which I do own.

I would think that it should be a relatively easy fix to modify this report to exclude bonds and CDs which are no longer owned.

Rocket J Squirrel

The workaround is to manually erase the maturity date from securities which are no longer owned.

gjeffhall

Options are different than stocks. Please have Quicken add the capability to track options as a different investment and not as a stock. Options expire or are exercised, when the trade is not closed out.

Sherlock

Quicken already has the ability to track options.

Rocket J Squirrel

Quicken can handle employee stock options. It cannot handle exchange-traded options except to treat them as stocks.

Rocket J Squirrel

Or maybe bonds. Here's something odd. In a test file, I created a fake option using the built-in type Option, and Quicken prompted me for Bond information.

I don't trade options any more (too much work for too little return), but I never noticed this when I traded options years ago.

Sherlock

Rocket J Squirrel said:

Quicken can handle employee stock options. It cannot handle exchange-traded options except to treat them as stocks.

Quicken treats exchange-traded options and stocks as types of securities.  Quicken does not handle these options any differently than other securities and, like other securities in Quicken, these options may be tracked.

Rocket J Squirrel

I just noticed this was tacked on to an old thread about removing old options. They do tend to pile up in Quicken. I wonder whether the newish Archive Transactions feature would help @Omar and others in his position. I don't have any options to try it on, but it "should" work even though it won't reduce backup file size.

q_lurker

Rocket J Squirrel said:

Or maybe bonds. Here's something odd. In a test file, I created a fake option using the built-in type Option, and Quicken prompted me for Bond information.

I don't trade options any more (too much work for too little return), but I never noticed this when I traded options years ago.

...

I see that also when initially creating the security with Security Type = Option.  Subsequently editing details for that security does not offer the same selections as editing a bond.   

GMGC

Options are generally handled the same as a stock and there are numerous issues around expiration, exercising, and tax reporting on them, especially short sales of calls and puts. As mentioned earlier, you cannot have any level of confidence in the tax reporting of options in the Quicken reports. I always use the 1099s from the brokerage firms for tax prep. Nothing worse than an audit and an auditor give you the side eye when you say you used Quicken for tax reporting on your Schedule D. I do about $30-40M annually in options trading and it really stinks having to go manually hide expired options each month to clean up the securities list.

Enhancements Needed:
-- Proper handling of exercised and expired options (not the added/removed shares currently employed)

-- Proper security matching of options that have expired since the last download (the CUISP matches, but the name is missing; why is Quicken unable to match on the CUISP since that's the unique identifier for the option?

-- Add a preference and/or default to auto-hiding expired options and removing them from the watchlist (why would you want to watch an option that can no longer be actioned?)

-- Correct handling of options activity reporting on Tax Schedule reports (IRS rules aren't that terribly complicated or different than stocks for options)