Why all the panic over mutual fund price updates?

Rocket J Squirrel

I see many users upset with the current lack of timely mutual fund price updates. It makes me wonder why. The net asset value of any mutual fund will be the same tomorrow as it closed at today. If you think you might want to trade a mutual fund, you can drink your morning coffee, read the newspaper, and wander over to your computer in your pajamas. The price you see is yesterday's closing price and it won't change again until today's market close. You have all day to decide whether to buy or sell. So why all the fuss?

Jim_Harman

And if I don't just update the quotes but do a OSU to get data from my FIs,Vanguard at least updates most but not all of my mutual fund prices at the usual time even if there were no transactions.  

I guess a lot of people are used to sitting down at the end of the day and checking Quicken to see how their investments performed that day. Being stuck with yesterday's quotes makes that impossible.

Chris_QPW

Jim_Harman said:

And if I don't just update the quotes but do a OSU to get data from my FIs,Vanguard at least updates most but not all of my mutual fund prices at the usual time even if there were no transactions.  

Well this actually brings us back to what the last problem with quotes exposed.

Some financial institutions (Fidelity for one) aren't sending out their quotes in a timely manner to Quicken.  Fidelity actually waits until it does its processing for the day in the early morning of the next day.

Quicken was doing the processing for One Step Update like this:

1. Get all the transactions/prices from the financial institutions.
2. Get the quotes from the quote service (which normally replaces the price from #1).

But because of a bug in the way they optimized One Step Update these were being reversed.  And what that meant for financial institutions like Fidelity it exposed its price for yesterday, as if it was for today.

Now bring in the new problem where the prices from the quote service isn't coming in and we are back to relying on the quotes from the financial institutions as the sole prices for that day.  For the financial institutions that send them out properly, you don't notice any difference, but for the bad ones, ...

@Rocket J Squirrel I chock it up to the same reason these same Quicken users will complain endlessly about adding a click or two to an operation that they might do at the most once a day.  They either have obsessive-compulsive disorder or they just love to complain.

Like you I fail to see any logic in it.
These people seemed be acting like they are "day traders" of mutual funds.

Or maybe there is a compulsion to "know how exactly much I'm worth" at the end of each day.  Which of course is a myth, since like your house, what is worth is what you sell it for, and you can't know exactly what that is until you have done it.

Mark1104

@Chris_QPW - and I bet few really cared to update their MF's today after the stock market drop today... 

wcm

Not only my mutual funds, but all quotes are not downloading until the next day. The screen says updated Aug . Any suggestions?

Ps56k2

When the problem was happening - now resolved - you would never really see the days results unless you stayed up near midnight to get the daily close for the MFs...

Sure there are other ways to get the info - I really like the Fidelity APP for my phone -
but the point being that our Quicken home  screen was not showing us our portfolio changes as expected. 

Spyboy1138

Thank you for fixing this.

silver

I too want my fund quotes at the reasonable end of day time. I can get the quotes from the fund; therefore Quicken could too. It's my business to know the quotes and I should not have to go to another source for that.

NotACPA

silver said:

I too want my fund quotes at the reasonable end of day time. I can get the quotes from the fund; therefore Quicken could too. It's my business to know the quotes and I should not have to go to another source for that.

Q can't possibly get the fund quotes until the fund company releases them ... and Fidelity, for one, has been tardy recently in releasing those quotes.

Here's a post on the website of Fidelity Monitor & Insight, my fund advisor.  FM&I previously posted their updates at 5pm central.