Segregating performance of assets within a single account

jcryanjr

I have a single investment account. Let’s put $150,000 in it. I want to have three different investment strategies of $50,000 each within that account as I really don’t want to open three separate accounts with the custodian. Say an aggressive growth, an dividend play, and a tactical play. Is there any mechanism to tag the individual positions for each strategy and track the total return performance of the three strategies?

Rocket J Squirrel

Yes. Use Investing Goals, which you can set under the Edit Details > Other Info button of each security's Security Detail View. Then you can set up a Portfolio View grouped by Investing Goal. Quicken has a default set of Investing Goals, but you can add your own as well.

Jim_Harman

I suggest you go to Reports > Investing > Investment Performance to see performance over time. In that report, you can click on the gear at the top right to select the investing goals to include.

Jim_Harman

The IPR *does* include dividend income if you set it up properly. See extensive discussions elsewhere in this forum for more info, for example here:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7885369/investment-report-not-showing-dividends/p1?new=1

Rocket J Squirrel

Yes. Use Investing Goals, which you can set under the Edit Details > Other Info button of each security's Security Detail View. Then you can set up a Portfolio View grouped by Investing Goal. Quicken has a default set of Investing Goals, but you can add your own as well.

Sherlock

I suggest you use unique names for the securities held for each of these strategies.  If the securities overlap, be aware Quicken's holding comparison with the financial institution will not match - do not accept placeholders.  For example, you may prefix the name of the securities with A for aggressive growth, D for dividend play and T for tactical play.  You may then customize your views of the different strategies by selecting the appropriate set of securities in the account.  Note: Cash holding may also be mapped to distinct securities.

jcryanjr

Thanks for the ideas. Both use the security description in some manner to segregate the holdings. When I tagged the various securities held over time for one of the strategies it appears the reports only “see” the holdings on a particular date and do not pick up closed trades. So a trade that yielded a profit or loss in the past isn’t being reflected in the total return. I’d like to be able to see historical performance of the individual strategies to track and evaluate versus goals/benchmarks. These two ideas appear to give the ability to see current holdings of a strategy but not the historical return. Am I missing a second step?

Thanks....

Jim_Harman

I suggest you go to Reports > Investing > Investment Performance to see performance over time. In that report, you can click on the gear at the top right to select the investing goals to include.

jcryanjr

Thanks Jim! I dug around that report and a few others a bit. The Investing Performance shows the transactions of the positions linked to the Goal but doesn't seem to pick up dividend income for a total return number.

Ideally what I am trying to get is something similar to the Investing Activity report where I can specify a starting cash value (independent of the actual cash in the account.) link the transactions/dividends, etc to the sub- account and track the performance. The Investing Activity report doesn't provide a total return number that I can find but the Total Gain/Loss is a start. It also takes any cash transfers in or out of the full account and posts the cash change in the Goal portfolio. I want to keep the cash to only the original amount and net proceeds from trading activity.

One option I guess is to create an investing account for the strategy and double post the transactions to both the true account and the shadow account. Hate to enter things twice though.

Jim_Harman

The IPR *does* include dividend income if you set it up properly. See extensive discussions elsewhere in this forum for more info, for example here:
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7885369/investment-report-not-showing-dividends/p1?new=1

jcryanjr

Thanks, that brought the income into the report.

I've come to see what I really want is the ability to enter, when entering a trade or income event, a separate account as a second entity in addition to the primary account. That eliminates the duplicate data entry and gives me all the reporting I'm looking for the separate strategy.

q_lurker

You are seeing the difficulties that would have caused me to answer No to your original question.  It can be done, sort of, but it is more difficult that it is worth -- to me.  

But continuing on your path, you might be able to download all transactions to a 'primary account' (perhaps Tactical), and then move appropriate transactions to your alternate accounts (Dividend or Aggressive).  You would lose the ability to compare holdings automatically, but could still do manual comparisons. 

In that setup, I would lean to keeping any MM sweep fund as 'cash' in the account where it was generated.  (I assume such a sweep fund is actually common to all three strategies.)  If you make a concerted effort to rebalance, you could transfer cash from one account to another.  I think by leaving the cash as cash you'd get a better measure of performance as individual strategies.  But even at that, income from the common sweep fund would need to be manually allocated between the three strategies. 

Caveat:  This is not a process (multiple accounts and moving transactions) I have used or tested myself.  Proceed cautiously with lots of backups.      

jcryanjr

I agree, what I would like to do isn’t possible. Separate accounts for the three strategies with double entry of the transactions seems to be the easiest way to get the performance data.

I don’t download the account data as Merrill dumps the money fund sweep transactions along with everything else and I keep cash as cash in my accounts.

At current rates allocating the income from cash among the three strategies is a joke and I don’t bother. I’m really interested in the strategy performance anyway.

q_lurker

I was not really suggesting a "double entry" method which I take to mean the same transaction appearing in two separate accounts.  I was suggesting that you download for convenience all the transactions from ML to one account (Tactical) and then move the Dividend strategy transactions to that account and the Aggressive strategy transactions to its account.  Each transaction would only exists in one place, the applicable account.  The Move Transactions feature seems to be pretty adept at its task.