Quicken Quotes Server on the Fritz?

DanaJ

@Chris_QPW Oops, did I answer the right question? Those are the funds that came back with yesterday's numbers. I have no symbols for TSP funds at all.

Chris_QPW

DanaJ said:

@Chris_QPW Oops, did I answer the right question? Those are the funds that came back with yesterday's numbers. I have no symbols for TSP funds at all.

Yeah, I was looking for a symbol of a TSP fund.
Quicken gets its prices from three sources.

1. Their quote service provider.
2. Download in the transaction OFX data from a financial institution.
3. Manual entry.

For #1 it has to be a publicly traded security, and has to have a symbol.
#2 is how all the "private" funds prices are retrieved.

It seems to me that the TSP funds fall into the #2 category.  But on know on the Windows side direct access to the TSP accounts isn't supported because there is no way that the government is going to support an OFX server and that is the only way Quicken gets investment data.

BTW Excel is doing the right thing.  Not giving the data until it has the right price.  As of now only securities and VTI have downloaded for today.

DanaJ

Well, I got the right NAVs for 15 other funds, just those 4 are coming back wrong at the moment. Also, that's what I thought about the TSP, but @fizzylogic had mentioned he was getting them somehow.

fizzylogic

DanaJ: None of the TSP funds have "real-world" ticker symbols. If you Google it, you'll see that the TSP advisory services suggest various equivalent index funds that closely track some of the TSP funds, but I'm not aware of any that have the same share prices.

I've always just made up my own symbols for Quicken and I enter the prices manually. Now that I'm retired, it's easier than ever...my entire TSP account converted to L-Income when my last target-date fund matured. I only enter the closing price for the last trading day of every month, plus the price on the day my monthly withdrawal occurs. (I know that entering the transaction automatically updates the list in "Security Detail/Prices," but I like to enter it myself first. This way, it acts as a checksum by showing an incorrect withdrawal amount in case I mis-type the date or number of shares.)

PS: This forum appears be running on different software since the last time I visited regularly, several years ago. To address a response to a particular user, do you simply type "@Name" at the beginning of your comment? There doesn't seem to be a "reply" button.

Chris_QPW

fizzylogic said:

PS: This forum appears be running on different software since the last time I visited regularly, several years ago. To address a response to a particular user, do you simply type "@Name" at the beginning of your comment? There doesn't seem to be a "reply" button.

There isn't really "reply to".  You can do quote a like above, and their name at the top is an "@ link" that gives them an alert that for a "mention".  The same thing happens for a @Name.

fizzylogic

@Chris_QPW Thanks, I discovered this as soon as I posted and saw the formatting applied.

@DanaJ I only have one mutual fund, so there was an obvious time lag after all my stocks updated to today's date, but USVAX didn't. Not a surprise, since mutual funds can't calculate their daily NAV until after the markets close.

On thing I didn't do this evening was verify that the initial batch of prices was correct. Tomorrow, I'll try to take a screenshot as soon as I get the closing prices, then compare to the Yahoo Finance website, and to a refresh later in the evening. For what it's worth, back in the "before time" when Quicken's quote server still worked, I noticed that downloads grabbed soon after the 4:30 p.m. EST market close would often change several times over the next hour or two before settling at the "final" closing price for the day.

fizzylogic

> @Chris_QPW said:
> Sounds like Apple decided to "optimize" Numbers so that "real time" traders wouldn't keep "bothering" their servers.   
>
> As in it caches the prices it gets, and doesn't get them again unless you restart.

Yep, there are a number of threads dealing with this issue on the discussions.apple.com boards. Some users over there said that when STOCK and STOCKH were first added to Numbers a few years ago, the STOCK function would return real-time (or slightly delayed) quotes throughout the market day. Some time after Yahoo was purchased by Verizon, this feature was stripped out and neither STOCK nor STOCKH would return anything newer than the previous market closing prices.

Regarding caching and need for restart, I may have spoken too soon. I wrote the spreadsheet on Numbers 6.1, but I also have a copy open on my Big Sur machine running Numbers 10.3.9, with the date range set for March 1 thru March 31. Although I hadn't messed with it since yesterday, it seems to have updated itself with today's closing prices, so it does seem to be polling the Yahoo quote server on its own. Now, I can't be certain that the one running under Numbers 6.1 wouldn't have also updated itself if I hadn't been repeatedly relaunching it. I expect all will be revealed over the next day or two.

Chris_QPW

@fizzylogic Makes sense.  We have people posting all them time wanting Quicken to provide quotes from all around the world.  What they don't seem to get is that costs money, especially for a business like Quicken Inc.   For the "consumer' it is usually paid with ads, or you are using that broker.  That is the reason a lot of the "quote APIs" have come and gone over the years, and why the were originally available to "everyone" and then started only being available in "products" like the spreadsheet programs.

In fact I was looking at the "credits" for the Excel quotes and it list like 10 or more companies the quotes come from.  Want to know the price of AMD in Bangkok?  

BTW as of now the only mutual fund that has updated in Excel is VTI.

fizzylogic

> @Chris_QPW said:
> Sounds like Apple decided to "optimize" Numbers so that "real time" traders wouldn't keep "bothering" their servers.   
>
> As in it caches the prices it gets, and doesn't get them again unless you restart.

Yep, there are several threads about this on other boards. I can't verify since I’ve just started with Numbers, but user "SGIII" wrote on discussions.apple.com that when STOCK and STOCKH were first added a few years ago, the STOCK function returned real-time (or slightly delayed) quotes throughout the trading day. Later, after Yahoo was purchased by Verizon, this feature was stripped out and neither STOCK nor STOCKH would return quotes newer than the last closing price.

With regard to caching, I may have spoken too soon. I wrote my spreadsheet on Numbers 6.1, but I’ve been keeping a copy open on my Big Sur machine running Numbers 10.3.9, with a date range of March 1 thru March 31. I hadn’t messed with it since yesterday, but when I checked a while ago, it showed today’s closing prices. So, it seems to be polling the Yahoo quote server on its own. Now, I can’t be sure that the Numbers 6.1 copy on my High Sierra machine wouldn’t have updated itself if I hadn’t repeatedly relaunched it. We’ll know for sure in the next day or two.

Chris_QPW

For Excel no mutual fund prices (except VTI) at this point, so I think we can safely say that mutual fund update is "next day".

fizzylogic

Sorry for the (nearly) duplicate comment above about quote updating and caching. The first one disappeared after I tried to edit it, but now I see it has returned, after I wrote it again from scratch.

Also, a question: How does one make quoted comments appear in the grey, indented box? My posts just have a ">" symbol in front of each line of the quoted material. Is this another "I don't have enough points yet" kind of issue, or are there some formatting tools I haven't found?

smayer97

fizzylogic said:

...

Also, a question: How does one make quoted comments appear in the grey, indented box? My posts just have a ">" symbol in front of each line of the quoted material. Is this another "I don't have enough points yet" kind of issue, or are there some formatting tools I haven't found?

sadly yes, min 50 needed... strange distinction, only à la Vanilla. :-\

Chris_QPW

As of an hour ago in Excel the mutual funds hadn't updated.  As of now it is about half of the mutual funds, Vanguard and Fidelity funds are updated, but your HACAX and a couple from my wife's 401K haven't update yet.

DanaJ

@Chris_QPW Interestingly, at the moment, the Numbers “STOCK” function is returning the correct NAV for yesterday (for HACAX), while “STOCKH” is still returning the March 9 value for yesterday’s date. (If anyone with Numbers can confirm this, I won’t have to call my Psychiatrist.)

Chris_QPW

Note I'm using the stock history function in Excel, because as you noted the "stock" on is about reporting just the one price (or the previous) so "current", but yes that one will return yesterday's price like you noted until update for today.  None of this is "real time" or even "today" for mutual funds.

I just updated again and they have all updated now.  So basically it looks like they start trickling in about 10am or so Pacific time and by noon (or maybe a bit sooner like 11am, I didn't check then) are finished.

dboltson

Just a reminder that you can always create yourself a free "watchlist" at Morningstar, and export a *.cvs file anytime during the day that contains the latest prices (albeit with a 20 minute or so delay, when the market is open). This includes ETFs, such as the aforementioned VTI.

So by 4:30 ET you'll have all your closing prices for equities that have been trading that day. (Except in the case of a few, like QQQ, which may be displaying "after hours" market data -- a glitch that, of late, Morningstar seems to have resolved.)

Closing NAVs for mutual funds are not available until reported by the varying fund companies. Fidelity has been updating by around 5:30 pm ET, recently, but you may need to wait until 7 pm, sometimes later, for laggards like Vanguard, T.Rowe Price, and a few other smaller firms [my RSEGX & USNQX tickers are always last to list].

Another thing to watch out for is possible mismatches, such as with Berkshire Hathaway, which Morningstar codes as BRK.B . . . but Quicken, to pull from their quotes server, uses BRKB (without the dot). But this is a "symbol" you easily edit in Quicken's "Setup Info" for your particular holding, depending on the source serving up your quotes.

Bottom line, while my Excel copy&paste [from a Morningstar *.cvs export] lacks the bells and whistles of the fancier solutions, it not only suffices for my simple needs, but (and more importantly) the closing prices are accurate -- particularly for NAVs exported around 6:30~7 pm ET. (When I'm eager, sometimes I download early, and then just manually type in the few stragglers, once they've been reported.)

Anyway, it works for me! Try it ~ you might like it ;-)

fizzylogic

> @DanaJ said:
> @Chris_QPW Interestingly, at the moment, the Numbers “STOCK” function is returning the correct NAV for yesterday (for HACAX), while “STOCKH” is still returning the March 9 value for yesterday’s date. (If anyone with Numbers can confirm this, I won’t have to call my Psychiatrist.)

I've been playing with this for the past couple of hours, and see the same thing for pretty much any mutual fund, but not stocks. Interestingly, the STOCK function pulls in the "current" quote from the top of the Yahoo Finance page (see attached screenshot), even though there is really no such thing as current price during the trading day for a mutual fund, unlike with stocks & ETFs.

Further, every fund I've look at in Yahoo shows just below the price: "At Close: 8:06 AM EST" (or some slightly different time within a minute or two of that). This suggests that "current" daily price for a mutual fund is actually the NAV calculated the the previous night and should become the "historical" price for the current day.

I presume that the current price for stocks, ETFs, and ADRs shows the actual--or slightly delayed--time throughout the day (I didn't start early enough today to confirm), but after the market close, they all show, "At Close: 4:00 PM EST" with the current after-hours price & time just to the right.

Are the current versions of Quicken able to download quotes? If so, perhaps someone can compare the fund prices & dates that Quicken pulls in against those shown on the Numbers spreadsheet and Yahoo Finance web page.

I suppose I can add a condition to the spreadsheet so that IF date = TODAY, use STOCK instead of STOCKH. I need to make another change to the spreadsheet anyway, so I'll work on this later tonight.

DanaJ

My Mutual Fund quotes were all correct for the date requested in STOCKH, except for yesterday when there were 4 (out of more than a dozen) that incorrectly returned the previous day’s value. IOW, when the values finally appeared on Monday and Tuesday, they were all correct; it was those 4 on Wednesday that were wrong.

fizzylogic

> @dboltson said:
> Another thing to watch out for is possible mismatches, such as with Berkshire Hathaway, which Morningstar codes as BRK.B . . . but Quicken, to pull from their quotes server, uses BRKB (without the dot). But this is a "symbol" you easily edit in Quicken's "Setup Info" for your particular holding, depending on the source serving up your quotes.

Whoops, just like Morningstar, my TDAmeritrade brokerage also uses the dot in the Berkshire class B symbol. Yahoo Finance, however, uses a dash instead, which is the same character I'm using as a "null" symbol to filter out non-trading days and errors. I'll fix this tonight by choosing a different null symbol or a text string that can't possibly be part of a ticker symbol. In the meantime, the "alternate symbol" column can be used.

Chris_QPW

fizzylogic said:

Are the current versions of Quicken able to download quotes? If so, perhaps someone can compare the fund prices & dates that Quicken pulls in against those shown on the Numbers spreadsheet and Yahoo Finance web page.

Of course they can, but of course the mutual funds don't update until after the close for the day.

Chris_QPW

Numbers is "weird".
Here is FSCRX in Quicken (Note that Fidelity {the first prince entry sends the previous day's price with today's date at 3am, this comes from the and has no HIGH/LOW information, the others come from the quote server.  This last one will be replaced by the quote server when it comes in for the day)

Currently Numbers STOCK is reporting $28.60 and STOCKH (for  3/10/2021) is reporting $28.15, which is correct.  Where it is getting $28.60 I have no idea!

Chris_QPW

Oops, not weird.  I didn't realize what time it is.  As in prices are coming in for the mutual funds.  Quicken now has the $28.60 price.

DanaJ

> @Chris_QPW said:
> Numbers is "weird".
> Here is FSCRX in Quicken (Note that Fidelity {the first prince entry sends the previous day's price with today's date at 3am, this comes from the and has no HIGH/LOW information, the others come from the quote server.  This last one will be replaced by the quote server when it comes in for the day)
>
>
> Currently Numbers STOCK is reporting $28.60 and STOCKH (for  3/10/2021) is reporting $28.15, which is correct.  Where it is getting $28.60 I have no idea!

In the old days (last week) Quicken would usually have all the NAVs ready just about now. 28.60 is today’s NAV. See https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=Fscrx&fr=yfp-t&ei=UTF-8&fp=1

DanaJ

And 28.15 is not today’s, it was yesterday’s NAV.

Chris_QPW

DanaJ said:

And 28.15 is not today’s, it was yesterday’s NAV.

I think this refers to this:


I tried to explain, but it is "complicated".   Let me try again.

As I stated before Quicken gets it prices from three sources, the quote server, the financial institution, and manually entered.

Fidelity among some other financial institutions are very "poor" at sending prices for mutual funds.  For most financial institutions the  price information they send when you download transactions is pretty much up to date.  Not with Fidelity.  They don't update the price information they send to Quicken until about 3am Pacific time the next day.  And what's more they used the date that they updated on, not the date of the close.  So Fidelity sent 3/11/2021 $28.15 starting at 3am today, will continue to send that data until 3/12/2021 at 3am.  But the Quicken developers have "programmed around" this by when they get a price from their quote server it replaces the one that Fidelity sent.

At any rate as we have both noted, my timing was wrong for checking this out.  
Note when I tried using STOCKH and 3/11/2021 at that time it told me that 3/11/2021 was in the "future", and wouldn't allow me to use it.  And just tried it again, and it did the same.  So it seems it knows that it doesn't have the 3/11/2021 price yet.  Note I'm using 10.2 for iPadOS.

DanaJ

@Chris_QPW Yes, I understand your explanation completely. I’ve never owned any Fidelity funds, so likely that’s why I’ve never come across their late posting habits. I don’t know why STOCKH takes so long to be able to return data though, as most is available at this time of day.

(And still for the couple of funds last night, I had gotten correct data for the four other trading days that we had already worked with. I think this is a separate issue though.)

Chris_QPW

BTW if I was doing this for my use, I would go with @dboltson's method.  I like programming more than most, but when you find that you are doing a ton of "workarounds" is best just go back to "simple", with more steps.

fizzylogic

I had to step away for a bit, but it looks like fastest (Quickenest?) way to get the current day's NAV for mutual funds is to use STOCK instead of STOCKH when date = today. Since this will have no adverse effect on stock quotes, it can be a global change on the spreadsheet.

As I'm discovering the many strange ways in which Numbers behaves differently from Excel, there are some significant changes I wish to make to my spreadsheet, so it may be tomorrow night or Saturday before I can post the updated version.

audreyhtx1

I'm glad to find this thread. I also suddenly had a new failure mode with Quicken Mac 2007 Quotes on March 4. I've had a few things no longer work with this old Quicken version, but Quotes had still been going strong. I knew it was different this time, because the Quotes popup flashed by much faster than it usually does when there is some other temporary server issue. I didn't find anything searching online that day. Today I was already creating a numbers spreadsheet to get quotes when I did another search and found this thread!

fizzylogic

OK, I've reworked my spreadsheet and uploaded "Version 2.0" to Dropbox:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n7pkphg1bq1jyvu/Quicken 7 Stock QIF-Maker-V2.numbers.zip?dl=0

A couple of notes:
- For some reason, when I tested the Dropbox download to my Big Sur machine, the file opened, but nothing would calculate. I reposted with the file zipped and download seems to work fine now.

- The main change I made was to substitute STOCK for STOCKH if date = today. I also added some error-checking (after I inadvertently entered an end date > 31 days and it locked up Numbers with an endless beachball).

- A few formatting changes, including consolidation of the 24 data sheets into a single one (after I discovered that Numbers, unlike Excel, does not permit selecting multiple sheets simultaneously for editing).

- Added some additional instructions to clarify how to use the spreadsheet.

I'm running the new and old versions side-by-side this evening to see how the mutual fund numbers compare. As mentioned previously, I also observed some differences in how the spreadsheet behaved under Numbers 6.1 and Numbers 10.3.9. I'll repeat with tonight's quote updates to confirm whether the differences are consistent, then I'll post some additional comments.