How does Quicken handle Option Trades

Daffy Duck

I am new to Quicken for Mac and I do some Option Trading. I am confused by the way Quicken seems to import and handle Option Transactions. Generally Options are traded as lots of 100 shares. So if I trade a Call relating to 100 shares it is reported a 1 unit and the price is the price per share and is displayed that way in my brokerage account. (I know this convention is confusing, but it is the practice.)

It appears that Quicken imports the transaction showing the number of shares not the number of lots.

I really need to get clear in my head what Quicken is doing because I have Calls in my account that were created while I was using Banktivity before converting to Quicken. Banktivity followed the way these transactions are reported.

In historical periods it appears that Quicken accepted the transactions at the values that the trades occurred at, however, in looking at my current portfolio, it is treating a Call that was imported as 1 share and therefore undervaluing those Calls at 1%.

So I think I need to go back to the imported entries and change the quantity from the number of lots to the number of shares impacted.

Am I interpreting this correctly

Quicken_Tyka

Hello @Daffy Duck

Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to post your question, although I apologize that you haven't received a response.

There is an ongoing Idea thread here to add the capability to enter stock options in Quicken for Mac.

This Idea is currently being reviewed by the Development team to be considered for implementation. The Idea does have some discussion on the topic that may be of interest.

I hope this helps!

Thank you,
-Quicken Tyka

Daffy Duck

Quicken_Tyka - I appreciate your response. I just moved over from [Removed] and I am frankly shocked that Quicken is so totally primitive in this area. The link you sent me too has no comments that are less than a year old and most are 3 years old and relate to Quicken 2017 for Mac.

The comments lead me to believe the problem is much more unmanageable than I thought. Further since there has been no developments over the last year it leads me to believe Quicken is not serious about addressing this issue.

I am still in my first 30 days - I am going to have see if I can develop a work around this evening or I will have to get my money back and go back to [Removed]

jacobs

@Daffy Duck Just because an issue hasn't been acted on does not equate to "Quicken is not serious about addressing this issue". I believe Quicken is serious about addressing as much as they can, as quickly as they can -- but they're also proved over time that they can't address as many things as users want anywhere near as quickly as everyone would want. If you asked 1,000 Quicken Mac users what their top one or two or three issues are that they wish the developers would address, you would probably get 75-100 different answers; "your priority isn't mine, and my priority isn't yours." Some comment threads on this site dry up because there's not much more to say about the issue than has already been written; it doesn't convey lack of interest on users' part, nor lack of interest from the developers -- it's just a matter of when (if) the developers will get to it.

The Option trades thread has a total of 65 votes, which in the realm of this forum puts it somewhere in the middle of user-requested priorities. (I don't have comprehensive stats, but anecdotally can say that a handful of ideas break 100 votes, and many languish with less than a couple dozen votes.) The thread has been marked Under Consideration, which means that due to the number of votes and comments, it's been passed by the moderators of this forum to the team at Quicken with decides which features to add to the future project schedule. Something like this seems like a no-brainer to add to Quicken, but the key questions are an assessment of how much work it would take to implement and where they assess this fits in the priority spectrum of all the ideas/requests/enhancements in the idea bin. (And nothing will get this resolved within your 30-day refund window for Quicken. )

You might also want to read through this thread or this one on the same topic to see some of the work-arounds people discussed. I don't know if any of it will be helpful. (I'm not an option trader, so I've never delved into the details.)