How to delete security I no longer hold?

sgoodmanmd

I have been using Quicken since the 1990s, and now use the Mac subscription version, 5.14. My Schwab acct includes many securities that I no longer own, going back 10 & 20 yrs, with balances. When I try to delete them, it says they are active and doesn't let me. So my Schwab balance is wildly off. I have seen many answers to this question for Windows versions, but they use commands that don't seem available on the mac version. What do I do?

jacobs

You can't delete securities you have used in your data file, but you can Hide them. For most people, that proves sufficient.

But I'm curious about your comment that your balance is off. If you liquidated these securities, they should show zero shares in your portfolio and not affect your balance. So you may need to dig in to find out why your balance is off. If they are showing in Quicken that you still own them, then somewhere along the way, you didn't record the sales of those securities properly in Quicken. If you don't care about what happened, or why, years ago, you can likely just go back to some point in time and enter transactions to remove shares to zero out your holdings of these securities. Once you have your holding and balance in proper order, you can hide the securities you don't wish to see any more.

RickO

jacobs said:

You can't delete securities you have used in your data file, but you can Hide them. For most people, that proves sufficient.

That's a new one on me. Where's the option to hide a security?

RickO

A couple more thoughts here...

1. If you don't care about maintaining the history, you can go the account register and search for then delete every transaction using a security. You will then have zero shares and no transactions, and you should be able to delete the security.

2. If you download transactions and Schwab shows the share balance to be zero, it should result in a placeholder transaction which zeros out the share balance. But placeholder transactions can occasionally get messed up and cause inaccurate share balances. To correct this, you can delete the errant placeholder. See this for more info:

FAQ: What Are Placeholder Transactions in Quicken for Mac?

jacobs

RickO said:

jacobs said:

You can't delete securities you have used in your data file, but you can Hide them. For most people, that proves sufficient.

That's a new one on me. Where's the option to hide a security?

Ugh… my mistake. You're correct that there is no way to hide a security currently. There is an Idea thread here were you can vote for such functionality in the future. (Add your vote by clicking the little gray triangle under the vote counter in the blue box.)

The way to get these out of your portfolio view, as I mentioned above, is to zero out your shares of each security, dated some (real or arbitrary) time in the past. Once you do this, and get your holdings and cash balance to agree with the real world, you're mostly set.

But having those securities can be an annoyance in two ways. First, unless you tell Quicken not to, it will continue to download price data for every security in your database. In Quicken Preferences, there is a checkbox for Investment Quotes: Automatically download. You can turn that off so Quicken isn't downloading price quotes for all your former holdings every time you launch Quicken.

Second, the old securities can clutter your menus if you enter transactions manually and have to select from the Security drop-down menu. You may want to rename these former-securities by adding a prefix like "z-" so they will drop to the bottom of the list and not get in your way. Yes, it takes a little time if there are a lot of them, and yes, it shouldn't be necessary to do this, but if you spend a few minutes doing it, they'll stop being an annoyance.

RickO

jacobs said:

First, unless you tell Quicken not to, it will continue to download price data for every security in your database. 

There is a way to turn off quote download for an individual security while letting the rest download, but it's a bit hidden: Open the Securities window and right-click on the column headers. Add the column "Download Quotes" (disabled by default). You can then uncheck those securities whose quotes you do not want downloaded.

jacobs

@RickO Well that's a good one. I couldn't remember what happened when they took away the option that existed until Quicken 2018 to turn off downloading for an individual security in the security window's Option drop-down menu.