Quicken Premier 2018 - Investment account download issue with iron condor

Unknown

I'm starting over with a new file in Quicken Premier 2018, due to multiple issues trying to get downloads to work correctly with my old file. I added 4 investment accounts and all had multiple placeholder entries. I started to work on cleaning up one of the accounts. 

The first problem I encountered is strange, and I'm concerned that I will have many more of these issues. 
I have an iron condor on IWM with May 18 2018 expiration, 5 contracts for each leg, that was opened on 4/13/18. (Sold 5 147 Puts, bought 5  145 Puts; Sold 5 161 Calls, bought 5 163 Calls.)

Quicken has repeated the entries for each leg of the iron condor 3 times.

The transaction dates are wrong, the quantities are wrong, the security name doesn't follow the usual naming convention. It uses IWM May 18 2018 161 Call, instead of the usual format : AMGN_042018C182.5. Sadly, I am seeing a lot of these transactions that will need to be fixed. 

 One of these sets of entries has a transaction date of 4/24/2016 for one of the placeholder entries. Instead of + or - 500 shares, it has +495 shares for the sold 145 puts, + 5 shares for the bought 147 puts. It has + 495 shares for the bought 163 calls and +5 for the sold 161 calls. 

The other set of entries has a transaction date of 4/19/18 (at least it's the right month and year, if not the right day). The problem with quantity and type of trade is also an issue here. What a mess!!!

Another set of entries has the correct date and action, but it is so time consuming to sort out and make corrections. 

Tom Young

My impression is that you're being too passive here, somehow assuming despite the evidence that all you need do is "push a button" and that the accounting for your complex transactions will somehow be laid before you.  You're spending more time and effort trying to download and then attempting to fix things after the fact than if you'd simply entered the transactions manually to begin with.

Since you've just started over with a new file you might want to start over again.  This time specify that transactions NOT BE automatically entered in the Quicken Accounts.  Enter manually enough history to get your current positions established, and then do your downloads.  Then go through the downloads one at a time either accepting matches, deleting them, or matching them manually to already entered transactions, and never accepting placeholders.  A placeholder is prima facie evidence that something's wrong and it's simply easier to deal with them when they're staring you in the face and not buried in a bunch of already entered transactions, some of which, if transactions are entered automatically, have wrong dates/amounts/descriptions.

It sounds like you could be the victim of bad downloads here and the fault could be attributed to either the broker or Quicken here, depending on how that information is being obtained.   It may be possible to sort that out; what broker are you using and what connection type is being employed?  (https://www.quicken.com/support/how-quicken-connects-your-bank)

q_lurker

Tom Young said:

My impression is that you're being too passive here, somehow assuming despite the evidence that all you need do is "push a button" and that the accounting for your complex transactions will somehow be laid before you.  You're spending more time and effort trying to download and then attempting to fix things after the fact than if you'd simply entered the transactions manually to begin with.

Since you've just started over with a new file you might want to start over again.  This time specify that transactions NOT BE automatically entered in the Quicken Accounts.  Enter manually enough history to get your current positions established, and then do your downloads.  Then go through the downloads one at a time either accepting matches, deleting them, or matching them manually to already entered transactions, and never accepting placeholders.  A placeholder is prima facie evidence that something's wrong and it's simply easier to deal with them when they're staring you in the face and not buried in a bunch of already entered transactions, some of which, if transactions are entered automatically, have wrong dates/amounts/descriptions.

It sounds like you could be the victim of bad downloads here and the fault could be attributed to either the broker or Quicken here, depending on how that information is being obtained.   It may be possible to sort that out; what broker are you using and what connection type is being employed?  (https://www.quicken.com/support/how-quicken-connects-your-bank)

I wholeheartedly agree with Tom's assessment.  You need to manage this actively yourself rather than rely heavily on brokerage supplied downloads.  

The other consideration I did not see in Tom's comments were the securities themselves.  As each option may require it own security within Quicken, you are going to need to be careful that downloaded security information from the brokerage gets properly matched to the appropriate security in Quicken.  You comment about + or - 500 getting treated as 495 and 5 suggests some mismatches in security identification.  

You may also want to look for comments from Kevin Osborn (https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/people/kevin_osborn_5647408) who does more extensive option trading.