Delete old securities???

RChan

I have been using Quicken for Windows since the early 2000's. There were quite a few securities that the original companies are no longer in operations. Since there were transactions to those securities, I cannot delete those securities without deleting the associated transactions.

Any idea/suggestions on how to delete those obsolete securities without affecting the account's final value/balance?

Thank you in advance!

q_lurker

What do you expect to gain by deleting them?  I don't believe it will change program performance.

You might try hiding them to ease selection of securities from a drop down list.    

miklk

Jut hide them as there is NO way to delete a security that has any transactions.

Rocket J Squirrel

You can do it, but it's a pretty drastic sequence of actions and it is probably not worth the effort and the loss of history. But as long as you make sure you have a good backup in a secure location, and you have some free time, you can try this.

miklk said:

there is NO way to delete a security that has any transactions.

This is correct. The key is to get rid of the transactions first.

For simplicity, let's say you have only one brokerage account, named Brokerage, which contains obsolete securities you want to delete.

1. Open the Brokerage account.
2. In the gear menu, choose Archive Transactions.
3. Go through that process, which will do a Backup, Validate, and move all transactions containing zero-share securities into a new account called Brokerage-Archive. Your balance in the original Brokerage account should be correct, but you should double-check it.
   
4. Look in the Brokerage-Archive account and take note of which securities have transactions there. (You can't use the Holdings button because there are no holdings.)
5. Delete the Brokerage-Archive account. I told you this would be drastic.
   
6. Now there should be no transactions in your file using the zero-share securities you archived.
7. In the Security List, using the notes you took in step 4, delete the securities which were in the now-deleted Brokerage-Archive account. These should also be noticeable because the Delete button will be newly enabled for those securities.
   

If you have multiple brokerage accounts containing securities you want to remove, you'll need to go through steps 1-5 for each of them before finally performing step 7.

RChan

Thank you very much to everyone who responded to my question. I am/was looking for a way to reduce the securities list. Especially for the options trading. Each option strike is its own security and 99% of them only have 2 transactions. The security becomes obsolete once the strike expired. After years of trading, it built a pretty sizable list that had obsoleted.

Rocket J Squirrel, Appreciate very much for your time and detail steps. It does sound like a project that I am seriously thinking to try. Thank you very much!
p.s. If it doesn't work out, I can always restore from the last known good backup file...

PetrS

This is all good but how do I delete hundreds of Quicken securities that don't have any transactions associated with them? I really don't want to do it one-by-one.

GeoffG

Quicken has no mass delete function. One-by-one is your friend.