Saved Reports - How to have Investment Reports show / exclude only CLOSED LOTS

eqpu

Hi,

I am using Quicken 2012 Premier and have following question.

On the reports created and saved, I cannot filter out or include "Closed lots" like the Portfolio view. (Portfolio View / Options has a facility to include or exclude Show Closed Lots).

It would be nice to have a facility which provides a mechanism to include all securities in the report where current holding is 0. (Closed lots). This will allow to find out how my completely sold investments have performed as there is nothing that can be done now to those investments as they are no longer held by me.

It should also be possible to include all stocks in the report where current holding is > 0 (Currently held stocks). These are the investments which are still held in my accounts and hopefully will perform in future so I want to know how they are performing by themselves.

Currently I do this manually by selecting / un-selecting securities which are not held / held by me in the saved reports to get desired results.

Has anybody figured out a way to show only Closed / Open Investments in Saved Reports automatically. (e.g. Reports allow to subtotal by Asset Class / Security Type / Account  etc. to find how each of these are doing but not having any mechanism for Closed Lots, not that I know of till now).

Thanking in advance,

eqpu

Boatnmaniac

The only way I know of to do what you want is to pull up the report you want to see, customize it to select only those securities you want to see and then save it ("Save As")  as a customized report with a new name.  You can set up multiple customized reports, each with unique report names. 

Then when you pull them up they will look just like you had saved them and you can tweak the customization, if needed, to add or remove securities as they are bought or sold.  After the customization has been tweaked you can then save them (not "Save As") so it saves that new customization.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is any way to opt for "only held securities" or "only liquidated securities".  Maybe you would want to suggest this as a product improvement idea at https://community.quicken.com/categories/product-ideas.  Also unfortunately for you, if this improvement does get implemented you would need to upgrade to subscription to get it.

eqpu

I have done exactly as you have mentioned above and am manually adding or removing securities to these saved reports. In the report which is saved for "held securities", I select only securities that I am holding and in the other report which is for "fully sold securities", I select only securities that I have fully sold. I look at the Portfolio Investment view to confirm the same.

I have given these suggestions many times over the years including on the forum, writing to Quicken, writing to CEO from the time that Quicken was with Intuit and even later after it was sold and I have also got acknowledgement that the mails have been received and the suggestions may be considered in some future release. However, till date nothing has improved on the investment reporting side of Quicken.

I have actually purchased few versions after Quicken 2012 Premier and that too higher versions of Quicken namely Home and Business for both 2013 and 2015 but have not installed them as I am happy with what I have and they do not provide anything more that what is already available in Quicken 2012 Premier for my purposes.

eqpu

Boatnmaniac said:

The only way I know of to do what you want is to pull up the report you want to see, customize it to select only those securities you want to see and then save it ("Save As")  as a customized report with a new name.  You can set up multiple customized reports, each with unique report names. 

Then when you pull them up they will look just like you had saved them and you can tweak the customization, if needed, to add or remove securities as they are bought or sold.  After the customization has been tweaked you can then save them (not "Save As") so it saves that new customization.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is any way to opt for "only held securities" or "only liquidated securities".  Maybe you would want to suggest this as a product improvement idea at https://community.quicken.com/categories/product-ideas.  Also unfortunately for you, if this improvement does get implemented you would need to upgrade to subscription to get it.

As for your suggestion on product improvement idea at https://community.quicken.com/categories/product-ideas, I have suggested features through multiple channels from 2012. I also got a call and an email with case number 01102817 from Quicken Support On Behalf of Office of the President in Sep-2017 when I last wrote to Quicken about these new features.

I have been writing from 2012 onwards and have stopped writing after 2017.

I have even purchased Quicken 2013 and 2015 Home and Business editions but ended up not using it eventually as there were issues at beginning in these versions and no advantages over Quicken 2012 Premier for me for my purposes. I can readily buy new subscription if some of the major features from below mentioned are available in newer versions without disrupting anything that is working currently.

I am repeating the major points from my suggestions.

I am talking of Quicken 2012 Premier and mostly about investment related features. I feel it is still same in ALL LATER VERSIONS TILL TODAY for majority of the below features. This feeling is also based on my interactions with Quicken Support at the time of most new releases.

Although there are numerous improvements in Quicken Desktop in various other areas, investment related features have seen only cosmetic changes.

Some of the major features that I am missing from Quicken Desktop and am either doing without or have found some workaround are mentioned below.

SAVED REPORTS

• Cannot see Closed/Open lots (Fully Sold/Held securities) AUTOMATICALLY. I have to manually select securities fitting these criteria in saved reports.
• Cannot use Absolute Gain/Loss or ROI% as a field for display. 
• Cannot even sort on ARR (or some other fields) to find best or worst performing investments quickly. I have to manually go through report to figure out.
  

INVESTMENT PORTFOLIO VIEW

• Shows absolute gain/loss and ROI but I cannot use average annualized return for ALL dates. I can use ARR only for a specific number of years.
• Number of custom views can be increased for Investment Portfolio View.

OTHERS

• No support for using Tags for investment transactions. Tags can be very useful for customizing investment reports like it is for other spending reports.
• Increase in number of Investing Goals allowed.
  
• No support for Midcap asset class. Only Small and Large Caps. Quicken mentions in its Help File that mid cap is not supported and also gives reason for doing so.
• No support for asset classes like Commodities, Currencies, Gold etc. 
• Setting High and Low alerts for each stock which could be triggered to remind the investor that it might be time to sell/buy the specific stock. This is similar to the other alerts which remind users when account balances go over or under a specified limit.
• No support for downloading international stock prices from other exchanges. Quicken does allow using multiple currencies but does not support downloading stock prices from other exchanges.
• No support for margin transactions (mostly will be useful for traders only).
  

Jim_Harman

Can you describe in more detail how you would use the information on the securities you no longer hold?

And how would Quicken calculate the performance of these securities since you no longer have any shares? Should it just look at the share price, or if not, what assumptions should it make about dividends and other distributions?

Would it work to add these securities to your Watch List?

Boatnmaniac

Sounds like you've hit all the bases in trying to get this product improvement made.  If you haven't already posted it at https://community.quicken.com/categories/product-ideas you might want to do that, too.  It gives users the opportunity to review and vote for improvement suggestions and the more who vote for them the more likely Quicken will put them into their development plans.  I do know that Quicken does consider and act on what is posted here because a couple of my ideas had gotten a lot of votes and Quicken did end up implementing them.  I've also seen some ideas posted by others eventually get implemented, too.

In the meantime, if you haven't already done so, you might want to consider a different approach.  Instead of spending a lot of time tweaking the securities list to get what you want, I think it might be faster and easier to check all securities, open the report and then export the report to Excel.  In Excel it's a pretty simple and fast matter to filter out the securities to show only what is currently held or what has been liquidated.  Other than this I have no other suggestions.

eqpu

Sounds like a good idea to move to Excel and do analysis there. I will do this too.

I will also once again post the suggestions on the website you have mentioned.

Earlier when I use to suggest it was available at https://qlc.intuit.com/post/show_full/dMqUgYdVOr4OdKeJfaade6/quicken-2013-new-features-particularly-for-investment?ppid=151213868 but is no longer available now on that site. It appears that all of the old posts may not have migrated to this new site.

eqpu

Jim_Harman said:

Can you describe in more detail how you would use the information on the securities you no longer hold?

And how would Quicken calculate the performance of these securities since you no longer have any shares? Should it just look at the share price, or if not, what assumptions should it make about dividends and other distributions?

Would it work to add these securities to your Watch List?

"Can you describe in more detail how you would use the information on the securities you no longer hold?"

My response for above is available in my detailed response below prefixed with emoji

And how would Quicken calculate the performance of these securities since you no longer have any shares? Should it just look at the share price, or if not, what assumptions should it make about dividends and other distributions?

These securities are already purchased (and sold fully) so the transactions are already available in Quicken and Quicken does include these transactions in total performance. So QUICKEN DOES NOT HAVE TO DO ANYTHING EXTRA FOR CALCULATING THE PERFORMANCE of these securities. It is just that Quicken should allow additional filter to filter securities based on whether the holding quantity is more than zero or zero like it does for individual securities or filter securities with specific characters in its name.

DETAILED RESPONSE FOR BENEFIT OF ALL ON VARIOUS ADVANTAGES OF HAVING SOME FEATURES WHICH WILL AS PER ME ADD VALUE TO QUICKEN'S INVESTMENT FEATURES IMMENSELY

My answer maybe a bit long for some people but i am writing in detail so that it can possibly result in some healthy and constructive interaction among community members.

My overall portfolio performance is calculated for all my transactions over the years and it includes all securities, all accounts, all asset classes, all security types, all investment goals etc. This overall performance information I readily get from Quicken.

All these investment transactions at a broad level have following major attributes.

TRANSACTION DATE, SECURITY NAME, QUANTITY, PRICE AT WHICH PURCHASE / SOLD ETC.

ASSET CLASS
Smallcap, Midcap, Largecap in general. I can even go ahead and say that Tiny Cap and Giant Cap also can be considered if things can be customized. However, Quicken only allows Smallcap and Largecap. I use Others for Midcap as of now.

SECURITY TYPE
This can be Certificate of Deposit, Annuity, Stocks, ESOPs, Bonds, Mutual Funds, Gold, Currency, Commodity etc. Quicken currently supports some of these and not others.

INVESTING GOALS
This can be Retirement, College Education etc. in normal case.

I take a bit different approach. I create a separate account in Quicken for each investment goal or for a specific purpose. In real life, I will  have one account with broker which might have all the securities in it but some of the securities are purchased for retirement and others are based on some paid recommendations and some others I might have received as ESOP or something else. This is one of the reasons for my not downloading transactions from broker even if available as it allows me to control both how I describe the transaction including in memos etc. and also allows me to have securities split across different accounts as required. It does result in some extra initial work but I am in control.

This account based approach also allows me to easily find how my major goals are performing as I can EASILY track these separately as I can always include or exclude individual accounts from customized reports. e.g. I can easily find how my paid recommendation service has performed or how my ESOP has performed or how children college education is performing etc. as I have entered these in separate accounts. e.g. If a specific account has given stellar performance or worst performance, I can always include or exclude specific accounts to get better overall picture of my portfolio with or without these accounts in reports.

I instead use Investment Goals to track most sectors as I do not download anything and manually enter securities. (e.g. Technology, Consumer Discretionary etc.). This also helps me as I also use Quicken to manage non USA accounts (in different file) where Quicken cannot download anything in addition to managing my USA accounts.

CURRENTLY HELD / FULLY SOLD
What I HAVE (Currently held) and What I HAD (Fully Sold).

For what I HAVE, I can plan and do something about it i.e. continue to hold, book profit / loss etc. or switch to something else. This is where I can find different kind of reports useful.

For what I DO NOT HOLD, I cannot do anything about it now or in future as it is not available with me now.

However, including ALL these transactions in the overall performance will mostly skew the report one way or the other.
If the transactions which I have fully sold have given me phenomenal performance in the past, it will skew the overall performance on the higher side.
If the transactions which I have fully sold have given me huge losses,  it will skew the overall performance on the lower side.
Same is true for Currently held securities also.

So ability to analyze Currently held / Fully sold separately definitely helps.

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
I want to find how specific investments are performing or specific accounts are performing etc.

I can easily do most of these by
Including or Excluding following in customized reports
- Accounts
- Security Types
- Specific Securities
- Investing Goals etc.

One thing where not much human or personal interpretation is involved as Quicken can easily allow to include / exclude securities where what is available is zero or more than zero in customized reports. Instead Quicken allows filtering securities by alphabets that are included in security name which I have not found useful at all till today.

Also, if I had an ability to TAG INVESTMENT TRANSACTIONS,

I could e.g. tag the following transactions to include or exclude them from the reports to get a better handle on my investments. I have not found any workaround or way to do this as of now.

For Mutual Fund transactions, there are times when I purchase in a Lump-sum manner vs that through Automatic/Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) which gets triggered every month. I can find performance of Lump-sum vs SIP separately.

For Stocks and Mutual Fund transactions, if I purchase following a huge crash, I can tag these separately to identify these as purchased during a crash and in hindsight if I find that I have bought something at the height of market, I can tag these too later. This way I can better find how the transactions purchased during Market extremes have performed. As it is the same security for which these events have happened and for the same account, currently I do not have any way to find this for extreme market levels across many years. The only limited way I have is some specific date range is allowed and that too only one range at a time. If Tags including multiple Tags are allowed like that allowed  for Spending transactions, these kind of analysis can be done easily. I do not see any reason why Tags and Multiple Tags cannot be allowed for Investment transactions also.

For Certificate of Deposits, currently I have created individual security names for different periods of deposits. If I could Tag the investment transactions, I could easily find how longer term deposits are performing vs shorter term deposits just by tagging them without creating different securities per se. I am still figuring out some way to do this and may do some experimentation on this in future.

Some of the additional features listed in my post above also will be useful value addition to Quicken's investment features. (I am not aware on how to link back to some specific post from the same chain or elsewhere on the community. If it is possible, I will highly appreciate if someone can tell me how to do it).

Jim_Harman

Well I must say you are using Quicken investing accounts in a very unconventional way. 

I misunderstood your original goal. It seems you actually want to be able to separate out securities you no longer hold so you can see their performance while you held them, and exclude them from other reports.

I think @Boatnmaniac's idea of exporting to Excel and manipulating your data there is probably your best bet.

eqpu

Jim_Harman said:

Well I must say you are using Quicken investing accounts in a very unconventional way. 

I misunderstood your original goal. It seems you actually want to be able to separate out securities you no longer hold so you can see their performance while you held them, and exclude them from other reports.

I think @Boatnmaniac's idea of exporting to Excel and manipulating your data there is probably your best bet.

Glad I could explain properly.

Hope to see some discussion around it if somebody finds it useful or interesting.