International Stocks Quote Download

enterfornone

I have an account with Interactive Brokers, which allows a direct download.
The account allows me to trade in multiple currencies. For various reasons, my base currency in IB is Euro, therefore my brokerage account is also set in Euro.

I have in my portfolio an ETF with a tracker LQDA - iShares $ Corp Bond USD D, which is traded on Euronext, LSE, Xetra, and elsewhere (outside the US)

Yet EVERY time, I do account download, Quicken does not pick the correct price from my IB account (currently around €107), but books some stock from the US markets with the same ticker LQDA, with of course is wrong.

1. I must go to price history and manually delete this wrong quote, then add one for the last day, which is correct
2. I never have a real price history, as once it gets overridden by the wrong US LQDA, I lose my other entries.
3. I NEVER receive the correct price for LQDE, although it's in the files sent by IB. How come IB sends price history (closing price for the previous day!) and then Quicken overrides this with their own and wrong quote?

The assumption that we trade only US-listed stocks is ridiculous. Please mend that situation, there are others matching tickers as well.

I got from another discussion, that Quicken does not pay to get international quotes, which I do not support, as I pay a subscription fee to Quicken and this is pretty basic functionality, which someone took a decision to save money from on my expense!
But in any case, there must be a setting to mark at least the stock as manual/international and get the price history from the brokerage, instead of a very wrong one. Same way quotes are taken for the other international stocks, which do not have the same tickers - CSPX for example.

Chris_QPW

Well in the Windows version if you edit the security and remove the ticker it will not download a price.  There is also a setting for not downloading a given security.  I would imagine that the Mac version has the same, but maybe a Mac user can confirm that.

enterfornone

These are the available settings:
On the first tab, there is nothing useful (first screenshot)
On the second tab, there are no settings at all (second screenshot). It's visible the wrong download, which happens automatically.
And I got again today the stock price for Liquidia Corp, which I do not hold.
I can disable the automatic updates from IB, and then only import manually generated qfx file once in a while, but that's not what I'm paying a subscription to Quicken for.

And first and foremost, the main question here is on the "cost-saving" for Quicken Inc, to supply price quotes only for US stocks and pretend that no one invests outside the US while selling on their MAIN PAGE the BOLD statement, quote:

"Get a handle on all of your investments
Monitor all your investment accounts with the convenience of a single view
Track both liquid and retirement holdings including brokerage, 401(k)s, IRAs, options, bonds, ETFs, and mutual funds*
See all investment fees together to understand true market returns"

Well, my brokerage is certainly not covered, although one of the biggest.
I trade with several accounts, which cover multiple exchanges and several currencies. I regularly trade on LSE, Euronext, Xetra, and have holdings in Japan. That's ALL my investments - and contrary to their statement, I pay my subscription, but am unable to - again quote - "Get a handle on all of your investments"!
What I get is a useless quote for Liquidia Corp... or nothing at all.

Just to clarify - The problem with international stocks covers them ALL. I get the wrong quote for LQDA, as it has a namesake in the US, for all my other holdings I don't get ANYTHING! What do you think I get for 4502 on the Tokyo exchange or for ATO in Paris? Quicken just ignores them.
I have to import qfx files manually every few days to keep track.

Quicken Inc. sells an "Investment solution" then supplies you one that works only for US stocks. Quicken says nothing about this pretty significant limitation, nor I get any real reason to have, outside saving little money for Quicken.

jacobs

You're asking us to explain or justify Quicken's decisions regarding support outside the US and Canada, but since this site consists or fellow users and few Quicken moderators, you won't get a response here from management about why they do or don't support foreign exchanges.

If you note the asterisk at the end of the sentence you quoted from the Quicken website, and scroll down to read the footnotes the asterisk directs to, it says in part: "Monitoring alerts, data downloads, and feature updates are available through the end of your membership term... 14,500+ participating financial institutions as of October 1, 2018." You may feel Quicken should support brokerages which don't have support agreements with Quicken, and that they should import data from international exchanges, but they don't. 

If you determine this means Quicken doesn't meet your needs, you can get your money back within 30 days of purchase and look for a tool which is a better fit for you.

enterfornone

Hi, thanks for answering
I have to factually disagree on the two points though.

This is an official page, opened and managed by Quicken. I got here from the help menu of the program. And as this is not some freeware, yes, topics here must be monitored by Quicken.
And in fact, if you open the help page "Help>Contact support", there is a section that reads: "The Quicken Community website is a forum that allows you to ask questions and get answers from other Quicken users and experts."
So yes, I DO expect an official answer, from Quicken staff.

Also, I apparently was not clear in my longish post above. The broker is officially supported. The transactions download, all holdings are correct, all transactions are fine and their prices are correct. Any purchase/sale has the correct amount.
The problem is that portfolio value is calculated using the last stock price, downloaded by Quicken not from the brokerage, but from some own service.
So I end up with a cost basis of 107 and a current price of 4 and a huge loss.
Or the other way round
My portfolio is permanently off. Unusable. That's for all stocks which have an US namesake. Any that don't, don't get updated at all, and at least get a correct price from the brokerage statement. Again - which downloads fine.

And there is no asterisk for that, nor that should be, as a holding of international stocks and bonds is part of any sane balanced portfolio.

Now there are two options to correct that:
- Providing correct stock (of course delayed) quotes for international holdings. That's what the "Get a handle on all of your investments" on the webpage should mean.
- If something as above, which is provided in numerous apps is somehow not achievable for Quicken, at least have an option to set a holding as "International", "Not supported" or "Too expensive for Quicken Inc. to support" and prevent the setting of completely wrong prices.
From the first answer above I get that the Windows version has an option to prevent price downloading. But the mac one does not. In this state, there is no way to have a portfolio holding with a ticker, which exists in the US.

jacobs

enterfornone said:

This is an official page, opened and managed by Quicken. I got here from the help menu of the program. And as this is not some freeware, yes, topics here must be monitored by Quicken.
And in fact, if you open the help page "Help>Contact support", there is a section that reads: "The Quicken Community website is a forum that allows you to ask questions and get answers from other Quicken users and experts."
So yes, I DO expect an official answer, from Quicken staff.

Okay, I'm one of those fellow Quicken users, and I explained how this forum works, and is (and isn't) used by Quicken, but feel free to disregard. Best of luck expecting an official answer from Quicken.

In terms of the security prices, I'm still not sure I understand where the problem is coming from. Quicken uses one or more third-party services for fetching security prices. Are you saying that Quicken is downloading prices for your securities, but they're all wrong prices? If so, that's something you could try to pursue with Quicken Support. At the end, though, are you saying you'd be okay with not downloading prices? If so, remove the security symbol and nothing will download.

enterfornone

Yes, indeed Quicken downloads wrong prices, as the third-party service to provide the quotes covers only the US. There is another discussion here where a member says that this is because Quicken has decided to pay only for the US markets. Any international stocks gets usually nothing. And if they have a US namesake ticker (in my case LQDA), that wrong one gets downloaded.

So once my portfolio gets downloaded from the broker, it gets a symbol, quantity and a cost basis (correct) and then Quicken overrides the price with some unrelated US stock. So the portfolio value and profit calculations are wrong.
I don’t want to remove the stock altogether, nor to prevent downloading of the information (holdings, cost basis) from the broker.
It gets allocated to the stock symbol, so I cannot remove it.
What I’d want is at least to prevent downloading of stock prices from that half-baked quicken external service. Only that, downloading from the broker to remain. But there’s no setting for that.

And that would be only an ugly developer workaround because someone in Quicken Inc’s procurement decided to save on basic stock quotes that every investor should use.

I’m amazed how little notion on this forum the lack of investment support the international holdings has gotten.
It’s quite basic to diversify portfolio not only between stock types, but also geographically. If you trade any international stock through your local broker, you’re affected.

Chris_QPW

enterfornone said:

I’m amazed how little notion on this forum the lack of investment support the international holdings has gotten.
It’s quite basic to diversify portfolio not only between stock types, but also geographically. If you trade any international stock through your local broker, you’re affected.

I suspect that most people get such diversity by buy funds that target such sectors instead of buying the securities directly.  But even so that really shouldn't be the problem here.

enterfornone said:

Yes, indeed Quicken downloads wrong prices, as the third-party service to provide the quotes covers only the US. There is another discussion here where a member says that this is because Quicken has decided to pay only for the US markets. Any international stocks gets usually nothing. And if they have a US namesake ticker (in my case LQDA), that wrong one gets downloaded.

So once my portfolio gets downloaded from the broker, it gets a symbol, quantity and a cost basis (correct) and then Quicken overrides the price with some unrelated US stock. So the portfolio value and profit calculations are wrong.
I don’t want to remove the stock altogether, nor to prevent downloading of the information (holdings, cost basis) from the broker.
It gets allocated to the stock symbol, so I cannot remove it.
What I’d want is at least to prevent downloading of stock prices from that half-baked quicken external service. Only that, downloading from the broker to remain. But there’s no setting for that.

On this part, you are either not following the suggestion above or there is a bug in Quicken Mac.

The suggestion is to remove the symbol from the security so that it stops downloading from the third party quote service.

Have you done that?

It is important to understand that Quicken gets prices from there sources.
One is the third party quote service.
The second is from your broker which is in the "transaction downloading information".
The last is manual entry.

Removing the symbol from the security should stop the third party quote service update for that security, but has no effect on the other two.

This really shouldn't be any different than if a person is holding a security that has no symbol (say one that isn't publicly traded).  The prices in those case come from the broker.

Note though the "order of belief" is manual overrides them all, quote service overrides the broker's quote.  And it makes perfect sense for the quote service quote to override the broker's.  The broker's can be quote old, the quote service is suppose to more up to date.  But not of course if it is the "wrong symbol/security".

And BTW that is the other big problem besides having to pay for quotes from other exchanges, there isn't a "standard" that works with all exchanges as far as how to identify the securities.  So adding international quotes is more complex than just paying for a service.

So bottom line.  If you have removed the symbol from the security and Quicken is still overriding the broker's quote, than there is some kind of bug in Quicken Mac that needs to be fixed.  But most likely that isn't the case, is it?

enterfornone

I appreciate taking the time to answer, especially in the holiday season. Merry Christmas to you all.
Unfortunately in Quicken, it's not possible to remove the stock symbol. Quicken gets it back right away.
See the attached movie here - https://www.dropbox.com/s/q36qqvgg791b7hy/2020-12-29_18-51-33.mp4?dl=0
(the forum does not allow videos). I created this in a new account and this behavior is reproducible.
So even this dirty workaround does not work. It's possible to remove the wrong quotes, of course, they continue to be downloaded wrong the next day.
And also - If I add a new stock to my portfolio, it gets downloaded from my broker - with a symbol. Then I'm stuck.

btw, downloading stock quotes from different exchanges is not at all difficult, as I manage also my portfolio in a simple Excel spreadsheet and it downloads all international holdings very well in the proper currencies even. If Microsoft can do it as a free addon, I'm sure the "Get a handle on all of your investments" solution charging well over $50 after the tax, should manage that monumental task [irony applied]

jacobs

Keep in mind that most of the responses you get on this site are from fellow Quicken users like me and Chris, who may have a lot of years of experience, but definitely can't answer for decisions by Quicken management or the developers about what they do/don't do and why. And those folks aren't reading and responding to the comments here, so no matter how impassioned or logical your request might be, no one here has the power to effect changes.

You can use the Help > Report a Problem feature to report something you think is a bug, but you won't receive a response, and won't know if they evaluate it as a bug which goes on the list to be fixed or a non-bug. you can call Quicken Support to walk an agent through the problem, and try to get your issue escalated if they don't have a solution, but the odds of success may be pretty slim. 

Chris_QPW

Well just for record I would definitely consider it a bug that you can't tell Quicken Mac not to download and given security by either removing the symbol or some setting.  In Quicken Windows both of those would have worked.

jacobs

@Chris_QPW I wasn't saying it wasn't a bug, and if fact detailed how to report a bug; I was just saying that Quicken's ecosystem makes it hard for users to know whether a reported bug has been tested and deemed a bug or not. All someone on the Quicken teams needs to do is say, "it wasn't designed to work the way you think it should work" for it to be deemed not a bug. I'm not sure they designed for a use case where a user was downloading transactions from a brokerage but wanted to reject price quotes using the same security symbols used by the brokerage.

In Quicken Mac Preferences > Connected Services, a user can uncheck the option to Automatically update investment quotes every 60 minutes. With this option un-checked, quotes only download when manually triggered by clicking the Account Update icon in the upper left of the accounts sidebar. So partial solution for @enterfornone might be to turn that off and to only update periodically, like at month-end. Or to remove the security symbol, disconnect the account(s) from downloading transactions, and enter them manually from time to time. I suspect neither of those options are likely to be satisfactory.

Chris_QPW

I didn't say that you didn't say that you didn't say is a bug.  

But let's make sure that I'm clear why I'm calling this a bug.

The way I understand it is that if the price that the broker is sending would be recorded and not overridden then it would be okay. But I understand it to be that Quicken is forcing him to download from the third party based on the symbol which is going to be wrong because it's international and it just so happens that there is a domestic security that has the same symbol.

Note that I'm assuming that the broker is sending the correct price after all he said that if he used the qfx it would be right. That is the same information that is sent by the broker as the response for direct connect request.

Of course whether you want to call this a bug or a feature whatever the developers are going to have their own priority that they assign this and given that not many people run into this it might be well down on the list.

enterfornone

Thank you for the responses. Chris's understanding is correct, the broker price is correct, the automatic isn't. I can't remove the symbol at all, and that symbol gets sent by the broker for every new holding at creation. So a closed loop with no escape.
I cannot even submit a bug report though, as Quicken gets me an error "An unexpected error occurred while sending your feedback report. Please verify that you are connected to the Internet and try again." Of course, I'm connected to the internet. Quite a bad experience these days...
I Will try tomorrow again with submission, if it does not work again, will call them on the phone (I'm in Europe now, will be expensive and inconvenient).
I Will post the results here.
Have a good holiday.

enterfornone

As I have not yet found the (I'd guess significant) time to spend on the phone with Quicken support, to offer a quick update.

Due to another great "workaround", applied by Quicken to "help" investors, there was indeed a way to stop the unwanted quotes download (and remain with the correct ones from my broker)

As noted in this thread (astonished to read its contents by the way):
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7882158/quicken-does-not-update-daily-investment-closing-prices-for-etfs

"Thank you for taking the time to visit the Community to report this issue, although I apologize for any frustration that this has caused.

This is a known issue and is currently being investigated it has been discovered that this issue is due to a recent change in getting price updates.

Securities with incorrect details were causing errors that slowed down updates so at this time only securities of the type 'Stock" an "Mutual Fund" will update.

You may work around this issue by navigating to Window > Security list and editing the types to be a stock or mutual fund."

This is at least from October and they have not yet fixed it. So I took advantage of the bug and changed the stock types to "Other" and they stopped getting updates.

Two learnings here:
1. The investment part of Quicken appears to be a complete joke for anyone other than a granny investor (no offense to grannies intended)
2. Quicken indeed offers official staff answers to community posts, just they are quite selective.

enterfornone

Deleted comment after the clarification by @jacobs

jacobs

@enterfornone  You've misinterpreted in the post status labels. "Answered" on this forum simply means someone posted a reply to a question. It is the opposed on "unanswered", which is a link in the left-side navigation to help identify posts in which there have been no replies. "Answered" does not mean the issue has been successfully resolved. Notice that under each post, there is a grey "Did this answer the question?" with Yes/No buttons. If someone clicks yes, then the post's status is changed to "Accepted Answer".

Beyond that, you're asking questions no one here can answer, like why Quicken doesn't use a service to download international security prices and when they will do so. There are only fellow users here, plus a few Quicken moderators who can't address why the program was developed the way it was nor how it will be developed in the future. I understand that you're upset that the program doesn't do what you want it to, and you can continue to rail at what you feel is unjust, but I don't think you'll get any answers or satisfaction from doing so.

Finally, I understand that your investing includes trading international stocks, but please don't insult me and the millions of other Quicken users who find it meets their needs for tracking our personal finances. I'm not what you derisively call a "granny investor" because I have mutual funds of international stocks and bonds rather than individual securities. Nor are many of the other investors whose questions and answers (some of which go over my head) I see on this forum.

Quicken serves a broad market, but may not be the tool that certain investors need to manage their finances. You can find threads here about other investing issues that probably affect a larger number of users which the program doesn't handle or handle correctly (from simple things like asset allocation, investment goals, and performance reporting to more complex trading issues such as selling of call options and additional digits of accuracy to support cryptocurrency).

In the end, one of three things happen where Quicken falls short of users' needs or expectations: (1) users find a way to work within Quicken's limitations, (2) Quicken eventually adds new functionality, or (3) users find and move to other software they feel better meets their needs. And while it's fine to lobby for new functionality to be added, I think you'll find that continuing to post about the same issue repeatedly doesn't move the needle.

enterfornone

Apologies, I misunderstood the "answered" label. Deleted the wrong post.

Also have no intention of offending any investor. There is nothing wrong with mom-and-pop investing. In fact if you don't commit to heavy research that's the only safe way to do it. Investing in single stocks, US or international should not be done without significant experience.

But please understand that for the minority who do hold international stocks, bonds or ETFs, this is a major bug. It makes the whole Quicken nearly worthless - portfolio value is wrong, tax reports are off and unusable, you cannot track gains, even net worth and all related reports are unusable.
This is not a minor thing, it's a killer. Quicken becomes a log of credit card transactions...

So I was hoping for an official position of Quicken here, as this is an official support place hosted by them and they do offer official "staff" responses in other threads, including the one I linked above. But alas...

Chris_QPW

Note I think you might be barking up the wrong tree with all your posts.

There is a bug here as I see it, but it isn't that they aren't providing international quotes.  The bug is that Quicken Mac should allow for not using the third party quotes which are wrong.  So that the ones coming from your broker will be the ones used.

In Quicken Windows there is both a check box for not getting the quotes at all from the third party quote system, and also you can remove the symbol to have the same affect (or use an illegal one like _This).

You can argue all you want about what "all" means and what you think Quicken should support and such, but all you are going to get with that is "Vote on the idea", which with only 3 votes is highly unlikely to get any traction.

A bug on the other hand that there isn't any way to not get an incorrect quote, is something that they might give a higher priority to.

jacobs

enterfornone said:

But please understand that for the minority who do hold international stocks, bonds or ETFs, this is a major bug. It makes the whole Quicken nearly worthless - portfolio value is wrong, tax reports are off and unusable, you cannot track gains, even net worth and all related reports are unusable.
This is not a minor thing, it's a killer. Quicken becomes a log of credit card transactions...

As Chris says, not downloading prices from international exchanges is not a bug, it's a feature which is lacking. You may feel this makes Quicken inadequate, but that doesn't make it a bug. A bug, to the programmers, is that it isn't doing something it was programmed to do. Everything else is a feature request, as frustrating as that may be. (If it is overwriting what you get from your brokerage, as Chris says, that sounds like a bug, and you could focus on documenting that specific problem to try to get it recognized as a bug and eventually fixed.)

While you have identified this issue as your Number One can't-live-without-it need, it's worth noting that there is certainly far louder clamoring for other features from Quicken users. There are likely several hundred feature requests users have for the company and the Mac development team. Every user has the one they place at the top of their list, the one that annoys them immensely that Quicken doesn't do and that they wish fervently to see addressed — but across the user community, there is no unanimity on which one should be first or second or third.

So we throw ideas at the developers with Idea posts and votes, and over time, the management team weighs which things they think impact the most people, which things affect a small number of people but in a very adverse way, along with the time each will take, which programmers (among those with different skills and disciplines) are needed to do the work, how changes relate among the desktop Mac and Windows products and the online Cloud services, etc., etc. They can't do 'em all at once, so they pick and choose how to keep putting one foot in front of the other to keep improving the program. If each new release has two or three new features, that means all the other requests from users have not yet been tackled, so there's disappointment along with joy with every new release. 

enterfornone said:

So I was hoping for an official position of Quicken here, as this is an official support place hosted by them and they do offer official "staff" responses in other threads, including the one I linked above. But alas...

Quicken management doesn't comment here. Ever. We get a once- or twice-a-year statement from he CEO about the state of Quicken, but neither he nor his staff respond to questions. We occasionally get a hint about work planned or in progress from the Mac product manager, but those are few and far between. As I've said before, the moderators here are not management who can speak to why features work the way they do or don't, nor what is coming. They do post "known issues" when it's verified there's a something not working as designed, and even then, the moderators don't know when an issue will be fixed. But the moderators never post "official position of Quicken"-type statements here.

To try to move forward…

(1) You've created the Idea thread for Quicken to add support for international securities quote. Good. Hopefully over some time, that will attract enough votes from like-minded Quicken users for it to come up to management for consideration. There's not much more you can do on that front.

(2) But the issue of prices coming from your broker being overwritten by incorrect data because of duplicate symbols between domestics and international markets is something I think you could document and try to report as a bug, along with the suggested fix of allowing users to disable price quotes on a security-by-security basis. My suggestion is to leave out your outrage over Quicken not measuring up to your expectations, and make a dispassionate case that this is a bug and need to be fixed because it's crippling to users who do hold international securities. Unfortunately -- you won't like this -- the Report a Problem feature on the Help menu of Quicken Mac goes into a black hole; you won't get any response, and won't know if they've reproduced the problem and entered it as a bug in their internal bug database or not. The best thing you can do it state the problem and lay out a clear way someone on the other end can reproduce the problem. This gets tricky when individual brokerages and securities are involved (because the person on the other end can't download the same things you are), but if you explain is carefully, giving an example of a security you hold on a foreign market with has the same symbol as a security Quicken downloads quotes for from some domestic market, hopefully the message will get delivered.