Select securities to graph from investment accounts

jschaffe

I have multiple investment accounts, some brokerage and others retirement.  When I select the portfolio view, I get a nice aggregate view of the performance of all the securities in an account, a class of accounts (brokerage or retirement), or all investments.  I would really like to have a way to select one security, or ideally one or more securities, to graph from the securities currently being aggregated.  This feature would be far more convenient and powerful than using the Security Overview button that jumps out of Quicken to a Web page that focuses on a single security.

Stephen Fisher

No kidding. QM offers no granularity less than an entire account. Yesterday I added tags to every transaction - big job btw - so I could do exactly what you want, select just certain securities or groups of them, like say preferreds, and get a report. No dice.  I posted a product improvement request several weeks ago asking that we be able to choose our own asset types or that they provide a much bigger selection. That would also achieve a lot of what you want. Please seek it out and vote for it. 

hartbult

Graphical, Interactive, Individual Security Price History

I keep waiting for an implementation of a graphical security price history interface, as was ALWAYS available, prior to and including Quicken version 2007. Only being able to see the roll-up of all securities in a Brokerage account is just NOT very satisfying, NOR is requiring the user to go through several clicks to see a web based interface with way more information than I'm looking for interactively. The user should be able to select any security they have a price history for, in the main interface without burrowing down, and see a graphical (not tabular) visual over time. Requiring the user to go out of Quicken to see data that's already in their individual database, in graphical form, is a bit arcane. I personally used this feature extensively in the older version of Quicken, and I keep waiting for this BASIC feature to be added back into the program. Since it doesn't appear to be forthcoming anytime soon, I figured I'd provide my "New/OLD Idea" into the mix.

Allen522

I know, right? I used this feature all the time in and before QM 2007 and I miss it terribly. Please stop driving us to your website and let us have the graphic chart view we used to get when we clicked on a security.

jschaffe

jschaffe said:

I would really like to have a way to select one security, or ideally one or more securities, to graph from the securities currently being aggregated.

To summarize some of the deficiencies of the current graphing functionality:

1. I can't view historical price information for securities that aren't published publicly, such as my company's 401k private funds.
2. I can't view my personal performance/balance on a single security.  I want to see my balance and have it show correctly when I added or sold some shares
3. I want to be able to see simply the share price over time or my balance over time for a single security.
4. I want to be able to select two or more securities from my portfolio and see their combined balance over time, preferably using a multicolor area graph.
5. In an advanced version, I'd like to select securities from different accounts (e.g. my 401k and my wife's IRA) and view the combined balance as above.
6. The security overview is distracting and inconvenient, since I have to leave the Quicken environment and return to it when I'm done.  
7. I don't want to lose the current Overview feature, but I need more.

I hope this reflects most of what other folks are looking for as well.  There are multiple ways of implementing this, but I think this feature set is necessary, valuable, and important.

hartbult

Still waiting...one year later.

As Jschaffe mentions, a significant portion of investment data IS NOT available via the web. If this is supposed to be software that allows the user to track investments, and not just pay bills and build fancy reports that look nice, add this feature...PLEASE.

[Redacted - Speculation/Disruptive]

ALRUIA1

This is ridiculous that we cant use a feature that was used by myself and others in a 13 year old + version! FIX IT!

lakegaston

I would really like to be able to graph each individual investment account.

MrJumbo

Quicken 2007 (Mac) let me digest a security's performance in my portfolio at a glance, within the program. I could overlay two securities to compare performance--Chevron vs. Exxon, let's say, or a growth index vs. a value index. I used this just about daily. The internal graphs provided would show when I bought or sold shares (and when the stock split), so I could test my judgement. I could quickly flip from a one-week view to a one-quarter or one-year or YTD or 5-year view. I used these all the time.

The new program should have enhanced these graphs. For example, I'd like to be able to overlay two securities not just based on raw price but also using their prices at the start date as a single index (to compare Amazon to Apple, for example, seeing essentially their percentage returns over time rather than just the enormous difference in share price today). Along with flat graphs, Quicken should offer graphs on a logarithmic scale so we can look at historic returns in a more meaningful way.

Instead the new Quicken (Mac) provides no charting at all for a security's performance. It only gives me a link to a Web page with a thumbnail chart that doesn't go back more than a year and doesn't show when I bought shares.

Worth noting: New Quicken (Mac) also doesn't let me see which stocks pay dividends or what the annual dividend return is, either as a dollar value or as a percentage of current share price. Quicken 2007 (Mac) made this easy to find at a glance in the Portfolio view. There's no available column for that in the new Quicken. Again: This was a valuable tool that I used all the time. It should have been enhanced, not removed. (For example, it would be nice to have a column for annual income, multiplying the dividend by the number of shares, or to have a column that shows the next dividend date, either the ex-dividend date or the date of payment.)

It's also more of a chore now to go back and look at dividend performance over time, although at least that can still be done. The old Quicken made security analysis quick and effortless. New Quicken still has a ways to catch up.

jacobs

MrJumbo said:

This was a valuable tool that I used all the time. It should have been enhanced, not removed. 

No quibble with your overall comments; just a brief note about this line. Nothing was removed, because Quicken Mac was completely rebuilt from scratch. Even though it has been 7 years since the first release of the modern Quicken Mac came out, the developers are still working on building features which were present in the old program. Quicken 2007 had 20+ years of development behind it, and you're quite right that the current Quicken Mac still has a bit of catching up to do -- especially in the area of managing investments. 

STX

I just want to echo virtually all comments and observations made within this thread. As stated by others, Quicken 2007 had far more capabilities with regard to graphing stocks individually and had better metrics with regard to seeing all forms of returns including original purchase price, subsequent purchases via new cash, dividends, etc. The various rates of returns were so much easier to parse out.

Will Fiveash

My issue is that the portfolio performance graph includes a money market fund which I use to move money in and out of which appears to skew that graph. I'd like to have the option to exclude that money market fund from the graph.

[Merged Post]

Dr_B

Rebuilt from the ground up? Seems to have been partially demolished from the top down with regards to its utility for investment tracking. It's difficult to understand why it's so hard to simply substitute the time series data for an individual stock for the time series of aggregated portfolio value. Surely you're just passing a pointer to a time series to a plotting subroutine?

I sometimes get the feeling that post Q2007, Quicken was cynically de-featured to enable a slow relaunch of things early users took for granted.

Wade Shanley

I recently switched from Windows to Mac, a quicken user for over 20 years. Man, this is painful in some areas on the Mac. It's waaaay less feature-rich than the Windows version. Some areas are better, I like the UI and the dashboarding and chart layout a bit better in Mac, but other than that so much is missing, The Tax tools, long-range retirement planning tab etc.

MY QUESTION: Does anyone know if Quicken posts a WIP on features somewhere? I used to work at a software company and we would post our 3-month feature sprints (with the caveat that things can change). It was very helpful to customers to know roughly which features were being prioritized. We would also post more long-range Pillars we had planned (6-18 months out). I know Quicken is an "old" software company but I would think they've adopted Agile/SCRUM by now and could start to be more transparent with customers about what is under development.

jacobs

Wade Shanley said:

MY QUESTION: Does anyone know if Quicken posts a WIP on features somewhere? I know Quicken is an "old" software company but I would think they've adopted Agile/SCRUM by now and could start to be more transparent with customers about what is under development.

No, Quicken does not comment on or announce what they are working on.

I know they do have detailed internal plans for their sprints, but those are not shared with the customer base. (When an Idea post on this forum is marked as "Planned", my understanding is that means it's not only been accepted for implementation, but assigned to a specific future sprint; conversely, many worthwhile Idea posts here languish with a status of "Under Consideration" not because the product and development teams haven't decided to implement the idea, but because it has not yet been assigned to a specific future sprint.

I don't know if it's (a) because they're in a competitive marketplace and they don't want their competitors to know what they're working on; or (b) because the complexity of the Quicken code results in them often missing their internal time targets for new features as complications are discovered and pieces of old code need to be rewritten unexpectedly; or (c) they don't want their software engineers, managers and support staff spending time on consumer-facing communication about what's coming, what was delayed, why certain features are missing or work the way they do, etc.; or (d) some combination of the above.

Some users have scoffed when I've said new features often take longer than they originally project, and say a good software company can plan properly. I don't have any insider knowledge, but a few times over the years when the former Quicken Mac product manager would reply to a question or share a few nuggets about direction, it was clear to me that they do often hit unexpected delays as they open up the existing code, some of which now dates back more than a decade to the original Quicken Essentials. As you're doubtless aware, programming environments and frameworks have changed a lot over the years. So sometimes making what would seem to us users as a relatively modest change/addition to an existing feature means they need to rewrite a larger section of the program because they can't simply update the old code without need to use a new library or underlying technology. 

And yes, some of this transparency or openness it something which needs to be in a company's DNA — and with Quicken, it is not. 

KenG

I have voted for this hoping this option to include/exclude an item would also apply to the "cash" balance. I move funds in/out to higher yielding external accounts. These transfers depict a false volatility in the graph. I posted this idea years ago to possibly use a check box similar to the "Y-axis starts at zero" currently available. But a "securities preferences" tab would be a very nice add.

[Merged Post]

ATL_AL

The Graph view on Investment Portfolio is helpful to review the historical on dip/climbs of value. This is an aggregate view of the account. It would be extremely useful option to select by a security to get a time series view of a security value over time (buys/sells/price changes).

Quicken Jasmine

Hello @ATL_AL,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your request.

Your idea has been merged into this already active Idea thread regarding the same request. Please don't forget to add your vote if it is not already there!

Thank you!

redseagoby

WHAT is so difficult about adding security price graph functionality to Quicken for Mac? We had it in Windows, evidently we had it in an older version of QMac, when we purchased a license (in my case about every 3 years) vs. now paying an annual subscription. Where does the money go? This is a BASIC feature…

jacobs

@redseagoby It may or may not be difficult to add the ability to graph individual or multiple securities to Quicken Mac, but that's probably not the issue. The issue is that the developers have a very large number of feature requests from users — more than 600 Idea threads on this site alone — and they can only address a small fraction of them each year.

And the issue is that Quicken users have widely disparate views on what features they consider most important priorities. While you consider this a "basic feature", there are users who say the same about many other features. If you're a budget user, you probably consider the lack of actual-versus-budget reporting a missing basic feature. If you have investments in securities which have had divestitures/spinoffs/acquisitions, you probably consider the lack of a tool for recording such transactions a missing basic feature. If you've come from Quicken Windows and used the Lifetime Planner in that product, you probably consider the lack of a Lifetime Planner in Quicken Mac a missing basic feature. And the list goes on and on… So the developers have to make difficult decisions about what features they think are most in demand, or would impact the most people, or would address the most serious shortcomings — and their decisions will please only some of us at a time.

You question: "where does the money go?" and it's a fair question. I think if you compare Quicken Mac today with Quicken Mac three or five years ago, or back to when the modern Quicken Mac first came out nearly nine years ago, it's easy to see that a lot of progress has been made over time. (Aside from the fact that they often have to spend time modernizing code to keep Quicken running with Apple's annual macOS upgrades, and changes of security protocols and processes with financial institutions — projects which consume a lot of time to keep things running, even though on the surface it appears nothing has changed.) That said, we're all frustrated that our most-desired features and functionality remain on the future development roadmap, wishing they could add more features more quickly.

Quicken Anja

Hello All,

The status of this Idea has been changed to Under Consideration as it has reached enough votes and has been submitted to our Product and Development team for further review.

Thank you!