IRR for investment shows ZERO in Q2017 R5

Unknown

Quicken 2017 R5 w/ Windows 7 in a virtual machine.

Returns by Security = Year to Date.

Bar graph populates perfectly.  But the IRR shows 0%, which is definitely wrong, since my investments (almost all of them) have a positive IRR.

Quicken gives me a warning prior to creating the graph the IRR is either above 10,000% or below negative 1,000%.

That is not the case.  No IRR for ANY investment is above 80% or lower than 2%.

Any way to find the problem with this?  I'm about ready to re-install R4 because I never saw this message there...even just a few days ago.

Thanks.

Unknown

Reloaded Quicken 2017 R4...same result.  Total IRR is flatline...shows 0%.

I don't know how this could be. 

mshiggins

gmalis1 said:

Reloaded Quicken 2017 R4...same result.  Total IRR is flatline...shows 0%.

I don't know how this could be. 

Bad price data?

Jim_Harman

Start with the stock Investment Performance report, subtotaled by Security.

Look through the details in the text part of the report and see if anything is way out of line, esp. where the Average Annual Return of something you currently hold says NA. This can happen if you bought or sold things during the period, or as mshiggins suggested, you have bad price data. As I have noted before, Adds and Removes can also cause probelms. Shares transferred between accounts are OK, however.

The IRR is an annualized calculation. For periods of less than a year, it works well for things like money market funds that have a stable share price and interest rate, but it can be very misleading if the share price changes, because it assumes that any trend will continue for the whole year. 

Unknown

Actually, I narrowed this down to one mutual fund from Vanguard that converted my regular shares to Admiral shares.

Vanguard downloaded the transactions as a REMOVE from the old fund and an ADD for each individual lot to the Admiral shares.

I've made a backup (of course) and I'm going to play with this later this afternoon and see if I manually delete the REMOVE and ADD's and change it to Mutual Fund Conversion if this clears things up.

I've never had an issue like this in the past...but at least I've got it narrowed down.  I'll report back later after the change.

Thanks for the advice Mary and Jim. 

mshiggins

I think you can use the Shares Transferred Between Accounts with the transfer account specified as the source account to generate Remove and Adds that will behave properly. You would need to edit the Adds to change the security.



Depending on how many lots you have, this may be the easiest way to convert the shares and maintain the IRR.

Unknown

Well, the Mutual Fund Conversion gave me the EXACT same problem I had before...my one mutual fund (the original fund BEFORE the conversion) gave me N/A as the IRR for the year.  

I'm now going to try Mary's way of Shares Transferred Between Accounts.  

q_lurker

Couple of observations:  The "Returns By Security" graph seems to be only available through the Home / View selections.  There (and in your attached screenshot), which 'Returns' are being presented is not very clear.  It is only when I go from that Home View graph to the full report or graph that I find out these are IRR (Average Annual Returns or Internal Rate of Returns), although I suppose the Total IRR line should have told me that.  Just seems odd that they have different titling for this report/graph than they do for the Investment Performance report/graph when they otherwise appear to be the same data.  

So you have really identified two issues - the 0% Total IRR for the home view graph, and the NA for the converted shares.  Maybe the second issue creates the first.  I don't have a ready built case to confirm that immediately.

But the second issue is well known -- In order for Quicken to calculate an IRR for a security across given time span, it needs to have a position in that security at that starting point.  So because you did not have shares of the Admiral fund on 1/1/17, any YTD IRR request for that fund will come up NA.  I can't say the math dictates that restriction, but it does seem to be a Quicken restriction.  If you ask for the IRR for both funds together, you will get a valid Quicken calculation for the IRR.   

Using the Shares Transferred approach will not bypass or overcome this NA limitation.  I believe having a holding of 0.00001 shares at $0.01/share (maybe even $0.00/sh) on 12/31 would overcome the limitation (as best I can recall).  

Unknown

You know what?  I just deleted the one "problem" mutual fund from the report/graph and called it a day.  I'll just have to somehow remember to add it back in next year.

Deleting the REMOVE and ADD transactions and replacing them with a Mutual Fund Conversion transaction did zero...as a matter of fact it just created the same REMOVE and ADD transactions I had before.  

Apparently, q.lurker is absolutely correct, because I changed the "time period" to Month to Date (instead of Year to Date), customized the report/graph to INCLUDE the one problem fund and it came back just fine...no N/A present.

I had no holding of that fund on 1/1/2017.  That must be the issue.  

Thanks for the great explanation and workaround.