Inaccurate and variable YTD ROI

fp

I continually struggle with Q calculations for investment returns ( i am using Windows  Q2019  R14.27)

1) Using YTD ROI and comparing it to ROI% with different dates gives totally different (and widely inaccurate) when the date on portfolio preferences is changed.  For example if I use 10/01/2018 as the preference  I get ROI (%) of -0.19 for VMLUX but 733,968% for YTD.  WIth VUSFX ROI (%) is  0.15  and YTD ROI is -52%  

Changing the portfolio preference date to 1/1/2018, makes ROI match a now correct YTD ROI, 0.56 % and  0.74 respectively.  I sold portions of these two funds this year but why would that affect the ROI?

2) I understand that the Investment performance reports use an annualized return calculation that is inaccurate for shorter periods, but why does the report add every purchase in the account as if it were additional money in the account and subtract the sales?   For my wife's 401k the initial balance 1/1/2018 is $87,137 and the current balance is $88,712. The  investment report adds to that initial balance all of the buy transactions under investments and all the sells under returns and lists the total investments as higher than the total returns  and reports a loss of 20%

3) any suggestions on how to get simple performance reports from Quicken? I have been wrestling with this for years

Sherlock

The ROI calculation includes price appreciation of the shares, dividend and other income received, and realized gain shares sold during the date range compared to the amount invested.

The average annual return includes all the transactions in the date range to extrapolate the equivalent of the APR that would have been received if the investment were in a bank account.

If you haven't already, you may want to review: https://www.quicken.com/support/about-key-investment-performance-calculations-used-quicken

Jim_Harman

I don't use the ROI numbers because it appears they are based on Quicken's "Amount Invested" number, which does not include reinvested dividends. Also I think in the Portfolio views it does not go down if you make a partial sale.

I find the most useful YTD performance calculations for securities or investment accounts where the share prices vary come from the Investment Performance report or the "Avg. Annual Return ($) 1-year" column in the Investing > Portfolio views. For the report, select the date range as Yearly and Current year rather than the default YTD. For the Portfolio views, set the As of date to 12/31 of the current year.

These settings should produce identical results. With these settings, Quicken will assume that your share prices will not change between now and the end of the year. Particularly near the beginning of the year, this is generally a better assumption than a YTD calculation, which would assume that the share price trend will continue at the same rate for the rest of the year.

To answer your question about purchases and sales, if I group the report by account, it includes money added to the account as additions to the Investment column, and money removed from the account as entries in the Returns column. Did you include all securities in the report settings, especially "No security (includes cash)"?  You may get odd results if not.

Jim_Harman

Another useful tool for evaluating your performance is the Investing > Performance Growth of $10,000 chart. 

The graph is controlled by the account, security, and date selections at the top.

Note that despite the note at the bottom of the chart, the S&P 500 index tracked by Quicken does NOT include dividends or other distributions.

Also, the security and date selections do NOT affect the Average Annual Return chart at the bottom.

Unknown

I'd like to see ROI calculations as a choice that can be picked for Investment Performance because IRR calculation on items held less than a year are not only useless but very, very misleading. I actually xl chart my own ROI on weekly rolled up to monthly, quarterly and yearly, and graph those.