portfolio value wildly wrong

Unknown

I am running the windows 10 2017 version (R15.15) and suddenly my net worth and portfolio values are off by 92 quadrillion dollars. Unfortunately, I am not at home so restoring from a backup is not an option. I would lose far too many transactions anyway.The portfolio value view shows securities I have not held since 2010 worth "only" 35 quadrillion dollars each - trust me, I was never that rich. I have searched for transactions to try to sort this out and there are none. The associated dates for the change are in Oct 2010, but in the account (one of my IRAs), no transactions on these securities for that week exist. Any ideas on how to get out of this? 

Jim_Harman

Did you try going to File/File Operations/Validate and Repair and selecting Validate file?

Did you check the account for hidden Placeholders?

q_lurker

I suggest you do a search on this site for "quadrillion".  You will turn up a variety of posts with some alternate solutions - like this one:  https://getsatisfaction.com/quickencommunity/topics/92-quadrillion-problem

IMO, the problem typically boils down to a specific transaction, or as in the case cited, a specific security.  

HTH

Unknown

Jim Harman said:

Did you try going to File/File Operations/Validate and Repair and selecting Validate file?

Did you check the account for hidden Placeholders?

Good thought. It found lots of damaged records, none of them in that account or in that date range. Also, some transactions dated 20 years in the future that only show up in the repair list, not in any screen/view. So the file looks like it has many problems. What it did not find was what I turned up last night. We have an investment account with a linked cash account. some of the records in the investment account looked a bit odd. so i went to the cash account, found that half of the record pair - e.g., dividend of $17.20 - and went to the matching transaction. editing the matching transaction in the investment account, the fields in the dialog box were all blank. No sign of the $17.20 which had been there once, so i typed it in. i then clicked on done and - nothing happened. it refused to update the record. just sat there.

i suspect that the only solution here is to go home in a couple of days, revert to the last backup - alas, may 9 - and re-enter about 100 transactions that have happened since then. This is not exactly something I am looking forward to, so I am seriously considering dumping Quicken after 30 years and finding something that works better.

Unknown

In this case, three transactions, since the -92 quadrillion is split in thirds or so. As a computer scientist, -92 quadrillion looks to me like the largest negative number expressible in 64 bits. 2^64 is about twice that, but is unsigned. So what possible design flaw could have allowed this to happen? Of course, it could just be a result of a corrupt data file which has been growing for 30 years. But I am not the only person this has happened to. In my case, it's three securities, not one. Please also look at my response to the previous answer.

UKR

Jim Harman said:

Did you try going to File/File Operations/Validate and Repair and selecting Validate file?

Did you check the account for hidden Placeholders?

Have you checked if Quicken made any Automatic Backups on your laptop since you started traveling? If your data file is in \Documents\Quicken they should be in \Documents\Quicken\Backup.
While traveling, it's always a good idea to also make manual backups to a USB stick that you carry with you.

Unknown

Jim Harman said:

Did you try going to File/File Operations/Validate and Repair and selecting Validate file?

Did you check the account for hidden Placeholders?

I have, and it has not since the May 9 one. (Been on the road since April.) Part of the issue is that my normal backup setup is to back up over my LAN to a NAS device. Obviously can't do that away from home, so I agree that manually backing up to a flash drive would have been better. I normally don't take Quicken with me but now I have to since I am "bi-coastal" these days. Good idea going forward, thanks.

q_lurker

Ken Greenberg said:

In this case, three transactions, since the -92 quadrillion is split in thirds or so. As a computer scientist, -92 quadrillion looks to me like the largest negative number expressible in 64 bits. 2^64 is about twice that, but is unsigned. So what possible design flaw could have allowed this to happen? Of course, it could just be a result of a corrupt data file which has been growing for 30 years. But I am not the only person this has happened to. In my case, it's three securities, not one. Please also look at my response to the previous answer.

It is certainly a common thought among the user community the the 2^64 is a player in this figure and that some pointer is being mishandled leading to that bad value.  

I have not seen this (as reported on this site) as a consequence of a data file corrupted beyond repair, though I have also not seen the canned "validate and repair" sequence correct the corruption (bad pointer).  

If this just appeared since QW2017 R15.15 came out, that could be significant.  

If it were my data file, I would work back in time to try to determine what transaction might relate to this bad value.  You've provided the picture for 5/26/18.  What about 5/25, 5/01 4/01, etc.  Once that 'last-good-date' is established (if it can be), I would then set about editing, or deleting and re-entering transactions on that bad date.  Within that process, I would be frequently exiting and re-starting Quicken and also backing up or copying the data file.     

If that failed to get me anywhere, then I might try chasing select securities.  I believe the 'three' securities may be a red-herring - a consequence of something else only because a number like 2^64 / 3 doesn't make much sense (to me).

Regarding your comment above, I am not a personal fan of the linked cash accounts; I don't use them.  Your observations there may be very relevant to the bad transactions.  For that aspect, I would try (after backing up the file) to disable to linked account (Edit Account Details, No for the linked account option) to see if that impacted the problem.  You may then be able to re-create the linked account by going back to yes for the option.  Again, a program exit and restart in that sequence might help.