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precious metals (3 Legacy Votes)

I would like to see under Investing the ability to invest in and have tracked the value of precious metals holdings. I just spoke with a CS rep and he told me the only way to track it was as an asset under property and debt. Example, I purchased 10 oz. of silver @ $17.00/oz on 1/15/17, what's its value today? For a stock-that's easy for Quicken to track under investing, why not precious metals also?
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You might see if the same workaround would work for you.
BTW, if you're truly running Q2012, then downloading is a thing of the past ... so use any symbol that you want for your metals ... it doesn't need to match up with anything online.
Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Home & Business
Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP
You can treat 1 oz of gold as one share of GOLD(ounce) and manually enter the purchases, and sales manually. Or 1 oz = 10 shares or 1 kg = 1 share or any desired ratio. Same style with silver, copper, and pork bellies.
Since there's a limit to the number of decimal places (6) you can use for fractional "shares" (ounces or grams or kilograms) I recommend you record your buy in the measurement unit that you actually buy gold in: troy ounces, for example. You can't record your fractional ounces with 7 decimal places accurately.
Go into Tools / Security List to add a security entry that represents your gold holdings.
Click the [Add] button.
On the next screen do not enter anything, just click "Click here" text at the bottom of the window.
This brings up the prompts for
- Ticker symbol: leave blank
- Name: Gold, troy oz.
- Security type: Other
Click Next. Choose or leave Asset classes as is. Click Done.
To buy new gold, start a Buy transaction in that new account using the Enter Transaction button. Fill out the form, where "number of shares" represents the number of troy ounces of gold that you bought.
If you are recording previously made purchases to bring your register up-to-date with your holdings, use "Add shares" transactions instead of "Buy".
The transaction in your checking or credit card account that you use to send money to your gold dealer needs to be categorized as a transfer to the MyGoldAcct (in the category field type the account name surrounded by [square brackets], e.g., [MyGoldAcct])
That puts cash into your account to cover the purchase.
Periodically update the price of gold in Quicken from the latest available quotation.
Go into the Portfolio view (under the Investing tab).
Check the "As of: [Date]" in the view's header and set it to the date for which you have a quote then press Enter.
Locate the Gold holdings in the view and overtype the Quote / Price field with the price quote, converted to troy ounces if necessary.
The price of gold is quoted every day and you can update your "security" price on the Portfolio view.
Now the main reason I favor having a ticker on the security is that there are ways to extract and import price data by security using the ticker. Such tools and processes are less or not effective when there is no ticker association.
Now running Quicken Windows Subscription, Home & Business
Retired "Certified Information Systems Auditor" & Bank Audit VP
Instead of manually marking to market your PM holding, why not just use a proxy like PSLV or SLV or GLD, etc. Most of these ETFs track the PM price very closely, especially I think, the ones like PSLV which buy physical. Do some simple math: figure out what the multiplier is today that gets you to your current market price, and then apply multiplier that to the total number of ounces. That total number of ounces will be the adjusted quantity of the ETF you enter into Quicken. If you want an example, reply on this thread.
Just manually input the price per oz. 1 oz = 1 share.
Easy to input using the Investing tab > Portfolio > Price Update dropdown selection.
-also older versions as needed for testing
-Questions? Check out the Quicken Windows FAQ list
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