Purging 20 years of securities prices?

Unknown

Seeking how to purge approximately 10 years of security prices (dozens and dozens of securities) dating back to 1998.   Presently using Quicken Deluxe 2018 for Windows.  I've been using Microsoft Money and now Quicken for a total of twenty years through multiple upgrades.  Consequently, I've accumulated almost daily historical securities price updates for this entire 20 year period.   I can only guess a database containing hundreds of thousands of daily prices risks a major data corruption issue.  Is there any way to do a mass purge of this data (ie: a ten year range) rather than entering each security individually??   I've done this with transactions for years, but how can I dump all these historical securities prices?

Unknown

This is how I have done it with Quicken 2017 and prior versions.

1. Investing menu
2. Security List
3. Select Security
4. Update menu
5. Edit Price history
6. Select top price and use shift key while selecting the bottom of the list to select all (or however many you want to delete)
7. Delete

Hope this helps!

q_lurker

@Tim:  In my opinion, your premise is unfounded.  Personally, I have closing in on 30 years of prices covering some 1000+ securities.  Those are not daily prices on every one but it is still a substantial collection.  That is just an anecdotal justification.  

The stored prices are actually kept in a separate section distinct from the transactions registers.  The QDF file you see via Windows is actually a compressed ZIP file of several files and the QPH price history file is one of those component files.  You can see your actual differentiation between that price file and your other stored files using program like 7-ZIP.  WARNING:  Do NOT use those types of programs to alter the QDF file!  I believe the risk of cross contamination and corruption is very slight.  In my case the QPH data is some 52 MB and the QDF data is some 89 MB.  

It can be difficult to rebuild pricing history.  I would (and do) leave that historical information in tact.  

UKR

Check your Security List.
How many securities are marked with a checkmark in the "Watch List" column?
If you are using the Watch List feature, review the entries and uncheck those that you aren't watching closely any longer.
If you are NOT using the Watch List feature, uncheck them all, including the ones you currently own.
This will reduce the amount of data downloaded every day.


Here's a "radical cure" to reduce the amount of price history data in your file:
Working with a Copy of your data file, to see if you like the results ...
Click File / File Operations / Validate and Repair.
Select "Delete investing price history".
Click OK.
This deletes the entire price history.
Run a Historical Price Download. This will quickly reload the last 5 years of price history for all securities with a valid ticker symbol.

mshiggins

UKR said:

Check your Security List.
How many securities are marked with a checkmark in the "Watch List" column?
If you are using the Watch List feature, review the entries and uncheck those that you aren't watching closely any longer.
If you are NOT using the Watch List feature, uncheck them all, including the ones you currently own.
This will reduce the amount of data downloaded every day.


Here's a "radical cure" to reduce the amount of price history data in your file:
Working with a Copy of your data file, to see if you like the results ...
Click File / File Operations / Validate and Repair.
Select "Delete investing price history".
Click OK.
This deletes the entire price history.
Run a Historical Price Download. This will quickly reload the last 5 years of price history for all securities with a valid ticker symbol.

Note - only currently valid ticker symbols will get price updates. Any historical tickers you have for securities no longer traded will not get updated price data.


I would only try this radical cure if there were no other options available. So pretty much that would be never.

Unknown

q.lurker said:

@Tim:  In my opinion, your premise is unfounded.  Personally, I have closing in on 30 years of prices covering some 1000+ securities.  Those are not daily prices on every one but it is still a substantial collection.  That is just an anecdotal justification.  

The stored prices are actually kept in a separate section distinct from the transactions registers.  The QDF file you see via Windows is actually a compressed ZIP file of several files and the QPH price history file is one of those component files.  You can see your actual differentiation between that price file and your other stored files using program like 7-ZIP.  WARNING:  Do NOT use those types of programs to alter the QDF file!  I believe the risk of cross contamination and corruption is very slight.  In my case the QPH data is some 52 MB and the QDF data is some 89 MB.  

It can be difficult to rebuild pricing history.  I would (and do) leave that historical information in tact.  

Thanks.  This info is actually very reassuring.  I'm about 1/3rd that size on my data files.  I will definitely reconsider purging anything for the time being.