Why does the performance report calculating IRR for an account not show securities sold?

L067541

For a given period the performance report of a grouping of securities by investment goal will not show securities sold but shows those bought. Both additions and subtractions should be shown under amount invested. Not showing sells makes the ability to calculate the IRR grossly incorrect. It appears as those sold are not included in the initial value.

q_lurker

@L067541:  In your case, I would start off small, make sure you understand that, and then expand to what you want to see.  By that I mean start with one security in one account, understand the numbers Quicken puts out, then add other securities taking note of the changes that appear as you do so.  In my experience, that path has led me to either the problematic transactions or data, or to an understanding of what is happening.   

q_lurker

Something else is going on with your data.  My QWin (subscription R26.23) includes sales for various securities when the Investment Performance report is subtotaled by Investing Goal.   

I would hazard a guess that if the value of the security is not included in the Beginning Value and the sale of the security is not reported, the security may either be excluded from the report or not have that goal assigned to it.  

Jim_Harman

Are you grouping by investment goal or by account as your headline indicates?

If you group by account in the Investment performance report, it is looking at the starting and ending values of the account and the cash amounts that were added or removed from the account. It should not show sales of securities if the proceeds remained in the account. 

I think any grouping that includes the security "No security - includes cash" will not include Buys or Sells where the money came from or went to Cash.

Jim_Harman

Looking at this further, grouping the Investing Performance Report by investing goal does seem a little weird.

For example, if you have an investing goal that started last year with a zero balance and you bought a new security with that goal during the year and kept it past the end of the year, the IPR grouped by goal complains and shows a starting balance of 0, a correct ending balance, and an IRR of "NA" for that goal.

However in the same situation if you group the report by security, it shows the purchase of the security in the Investments column and a reasonable IRR.

I think the reason for this is that grouping by investing goal does not match any transactions, only the starting and ending balances for each goal. Other groupings, by security type or asset class for example, do show the underlying transactions. I would call this a bug.

L067541

I have an account with stocks and bonds. I group one in bonds, the other in stocks. Looking at just the stock side of it, The total in stocks stays the same. Now if a sell one security and use the proceeds to buy a second, then when I run the report only the buy shows up in the amount invested but not the sell. So if it included the value at the beginning then more more was added to the amount value. I guess if it did not include the sold securities at the beginning then it should be OK as long as I did not get a dividend payment from the sold security in that period. I will have to check the amounts at the beginning to see what it included but the IRR looks way off and unrealistic for an account I only sold and bought one security.

Jim_Harman

Wait a minute. What exactly are you selecting in the Subtotal by box at the top of the report?

So far you have mentioned Account and Investing Goal, and now it sounds like you are saying Security type. Which is it?

If you are subtotaling by Investing goal, do you really have Investing Goals called "Stocks" and "Bonds"?

Please explain. 

L067541

I have setup several investing goals to group stocks. I customize the report by selecting only the account of interest and the investing goal. That way I am only getting those stocks that fit that criteria. When I run the report if any buys and sells occur; the sells are listed under returns and the buys are listed in investments. I selected a quarter which had no changes. If I go to my portfolio and selected show by investing goal and restrict that to the account of interest. I can get the starting market value and ending market value for the period. Doing that the starting market value is 8.8 K off. and the ending value is 2.3 K different. For the next quarter the ending value is 1.47K off. Looking at the year to date just 12 days later, it is 1.8K off. Nothing matches.

I will say that all the totals have * next to the value which indicates missing data, but when I click on the show me, I do not see any such missing transactions. However if I do another grouping in another investment account with no *, It still does not match.

Bottom line is This program cannot calculate rate of return accurately. Not sure why I pay them money every year to give be junk.

q_lurker

@L067541:  In your case, I would start off small, make sure you understand that, and then expand to what you want to see.  By that I mean start with one security in one account, understand the numbers Quicken puts out, then add other securities taking note of the changes that appear as you do so.  In my experience, that path has led me to either the problematic transactions or data, or to an understanding of what is happening.   

L067541

Thank You I did that and figured out the difference was due to having securities without symbols checked under securities when customizing. That needs to be unchecked even though all your securities under an account are labeled. Now it matches. Are there any reports that give ROI vs IRR?

Jim_Harman

The * for missing data means you have one or more Placeholders in that account. You need to resolve those before you can get meaningful performance data.

q_lurker

L067541 said:

... Are there any reports that give ROI vs IRR?

No such reports. Because of the way Quicken handles Amount Invested, I consider ROI value suspect if security trading has taken place. I believe ROI is only available thru portfolio views which offer limited IRR data.