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Archiving investment transactions - any benefit?

Rocket J Squirrel

This being year-end and all, I am considering using the Archive Transactions feature in investment accounts.

My question is whether it truly results in a performance improvement in the original account once the closed-position transactions have been moved out.

Have any of you tried this and noticed any performance benefit?

[EDIT] 2nd question: have any of you had any problems after archiving? Seen any related bugs?

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J_Mike

I have used the Archive feature on my primary brokerage account.
Had a change of broker rep and we embarked on a new investment strategy - sold all existing holdings at that point in time. This made for a clean break.
I went back and split the account as of a specific date - moving all closed positions and all poor cash transactions to the archive account.

Had no problems with the procedure - went very smoothly.
Wound up with the main account spot-on as to cash balance.

Difficult to say if there was a performance improvement in my case as the original account was not all that large - <3000 transactions over a ~10 year time span. I would expect noticeable improvement if it had been 10,000+ transactions.

If warranted I could easily reverse the procedure - recombine back to a single account.
All in all I think it is a very useful feature.

Have been a bit surprised that there has been almost no comment or discussion on it here in the forum - beyond the initial roll-out.

Rocket J Squirrel

J_Mike said:

Difficult to say if there was a performance improvement in my case as the original account was not all that large - <3000 transactions over a ~10 year time span. I would expect noticeable improvement if it had been 10,000+ transactions.

Have been a bit surprised that there has been almost no comment or discussion on it here in the forum - beyond the initial roll-out.

Good point on the number of transactions. I'm a buy-and-hold investor, and none of my brokerage accounts has more than 1,600 transactions. So perhaps I will see little or no benefit worthy of having the extra accounts sitting around. I don't think I've seen any guidance from Quicken on a minimum number of securities or transactions that will show obvious benefit. Only "For accounts with a large proportion of closed positions, this can improve register and report performance noticeably."

I'm also surprised there's been no discussion. Maybe most people never noticed this newish feature when it debuted. It's kind of hidden behind a gear and nowhere else.

J_Mike

I too am a buy & hold investor - preservation of capital strategy.

This Archive feature will likely benefit the very active trader - the day trader particularly.
Haven't noted any inquiries from this type of trader since the Archive feature came out.

Rocket J Squirrel

We've always said Q wasn't meant for day traders. There must be enough "active" traders that the Q folks went to the effort to add this feature.

Here's another question. I wonder what happens if you archive the same account twice. Say I archive today and then I archive the same account 5 years from now. I wonder whether Q would be smart enough to append to the existing -Archive account, create another one with a different name, or try to create another one with the same name and get itself in trouble.

Mark Schaefer

Rocket J - if you archive the same account, Quicken sequentially numbers them - Account Name - Archive 1, Account Name - Archive 2, etc. Doesn't appear that Quicken appends them. Then I hide the archived accounts so they're not on the Account list.

jtrom55

I just got my Q 2020. I'm one of those active traders. The question I have is if archiving transactions, does it then allow one to delete the security in the security list? My list is huge since I've been with Quicken for decades. It would just make it easier to move around the list if I could delete them. I may have to start a new topic, but I thought I'd ask here first. Plus it's liking having a basement full of old useless things, but no way of being able to get rid of them. They aren't harming anything (likely don't need the room) but it's a mess. LOL
TIA

Chris_QPW

@jtrom55 No it will not allow you to delete a security. You can't delete a security as long as there are any transactions using that security.

P.S. "Archive" in this case means moving transactions from one register to another, not removing them from the data file.

Chris_QPW

As for the original questions here, since I'm seeing them for the first time.

1) As far as I can tell the question on performance is pretty much the same answer as we always gave for doing the same by transferring only the active securities to a new account. Archive is only going to allow transferring the close lots, so it would be very similar. And basically you can answer if there is any chance of a performance speed up with a simple test. Look at how the account performs. Create a new account with just a few transactions in it. If they perform about the same you have your answer, it isn't possible to speed it up. The recommendation to try something like this was for statements like "I hit enter and it takes 30 seconds for it to save the transaction".

2) A problem has surfaced and that has to do with Multiple Currencies. If your Home currency is set to say USD, and the account is CAD, the archive account will be created in USD instead of CAD like it should be. Note this can be especially bad for the Canadian version where they can't change the home currency.

jtrom55

> @Chris_QPW said:
> @jtrom55 No it will not allow you to delete a security. You can't delete a security as long as there are any transactions using that security.
> P.S. "Archive" in this case means moving transactions from one register to another, not removing them from the data file.

Ah, so you're saying that even that the "archived" account no longer shows transactions, they still exist..in the other file? If that is the case, then wouldn't one be able to delete the security since there no longer is a transaction shown in the file? I would think I'd have to do it by hand, and it would be tedious, but I think I'd see more stocks in the list where the delete button is not greyed out. I'll try archiving and see if the security list changes a stock to allow me to delete it. I think I see your point though. Guess I'm still hoping for a way to shorten down my security list. It's freakin huge!

Chris_QPW

jtrom55 said:

Ah, so you're saying that even that the "archived" account no longer shows transactions, they still exist..in the other file? If that is the case, then wouldn't one be able to delete the security since there no longer is a transaction shown in the file? I would think I'd have to do it by hand, and it would be tedious, but I think I'd see more stocks in the list where the delete button is not greyed out. I'll try archiving and see if the security list changes a stock to allow me to delete it. I think I see your point though. Guess I'm still hoping for a way to shorten down my security list. It's freakin huge!

The investment archive function creates a new investment account, and moves "closed lot" transactions to it, it will not move open lots. The transactions are not moved to another data file, and the account isn't hidden. You can hide the account if you want though.

And note that the year end copy function will not touch any investment transactions either.

The only function that will delete investment transactions is:

File -> File Operations -> Copy, which has an option to remove investment transactions.

But note I fully expect anyone that uses such a function which is just based on a date will find that their investment accounts and maybe others will be mess up unless they are so lucky that the date they pick has no open lots before that date.

eqpu

> @Rocket J Squirrel said:
> We've always said Q wasn't meant for day traders. There must be enough "active" traders that the Q folks went to the effort to add this feature.Here's another question. I wonder what happens if you archive the same account twice. Say I archive today and then I archive the same account 5 years from now. I wonder whether Q would be smart enough to append to the existing -Archive account, create another one with a different name, or try to create another one with the same name and get itself in trouble.

When I did try out day trading for few transactions (and found that trading is not my kind of work) , I did try to enter these few transactions in Quicken but could not figure out how to do so successfully. As per my knowledge, Quicken does not support Margin trading (i.e. I want to find the absolute gain/loss, ROI%, ARR etc. for the actual amount that I have used in margin transactions (margin amount) rather than the total contract value. Quicken calculates the actual value as if the entire amount was paid and/or received for the transaction).

eichmat

> @"Mark Schaefer" said:
> Rocket J - if you archive the same account, Quicken sequentially numbers them - Account Name - Archive 1, Account Name - Archive 2, etc. Doesn't appear that Quicken appends them. Then I hide the archived accounts so they're not on the Account list.

You can move transactions from one Archive to another, then delete the, now empty, archive.

My current 401k includes not just my contributions and employer match: there are 7 other sources (rollover from a previous 401k, company match pre-merger, QNEC, Safe Harbor company match, etc.). When transactions occur, the broker (T. Rowe Price) provides separate entries per source. My biweekly contributions and match come in with two entries per investment. When there rebalancing or when investment options leave/change, there are 9 transactions for the one "move" making for a very large ledger.

With 14-years of transactions, I ended up with over 7,000 transactions in my 401k ledger... sometimes it would take 30-seconds to complete a transaction in the ledger. Since I've moved out the closed positions, the main 401k ledger is much more responsive.

Now after each major change, I do an archive, then move those transactions to the main archive.