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Multiple currencies in single brokerage account

asherfamily1

I just deposited British pounds (GBP) into my Fidelity brokerage account. When I view my account at Fidelity.com, I see one line for Cash (USD), and another for pounds, which shows the sterling amount under quantity, and its current USD equivalent under market value.

When I update my Quicken accounts, I see a single deposit to the core cash account in the GBPin amount. Is there a way to track this automatic in USD based on the information available at Fidelity?

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Accepted answers

Chris_QPW

I would say the only choices you have are:

Remove the GBP from your account. Maybe creating a new account account at Fidelity just for it. And I suspect that you will have to make that one a pure manual account.
Go to a purely manual account and use something like @Tom Young suggested to record it.
On each download "fight/change" what is downloaded to shoehorn it into the suggestion that @Tom Young suggested.

The account setup you have at Fidelity isn't supported because of these two limitations in Quicken Windows US, and I'm quite sure the first one is not going to ever change.

Only one currency per account.
No downloading in a currency other than USD.

Note that in the Canadian version it is possible to download in a different currencies like CAD, and USD, and I assume GBP would work too, but that feature was never put in the US version.

As for having multiple currencies per account I don't see that ever happening, it is just way to complicated.

All comments

Jim_Harman

Are you saying that when you downloaded the transactions to Quicken, it added the GBP to the USD without converting? That would clearly be wrong.

One way you might be able to handle this would be to create a security in Quicken called "Pounds" or whatever to hold your GBP, with a share price equal to the exchange rate. This would probably require some manual entries and adjustments to match the downloaded transactions.

Note that Quicken only supports one currency per account for securities, so you can't have securities that are priced in GBP along with US securities in the same account.

Also US Quicken does not maintain an exchange rate history, so if you have a mixture of USD and other accounts, performance calculations will be based on the latest exchange rates.

Tom Young

I suppose one approach could be to create a "security" called GBP with the number of "shares" set at however many GBPs you deposited and a cost basis of however many US dollars those GBPs cost. I'd guess that you would need to update the "quote" yourself.

asherfamily1

In response to Jim, yes! The Quicken download now shows a single cash amount that is the unadjusted sum of USD and GBP. I need to work out how to fix this before doing anything else!

Chris_QPW

I would say the only choices you have are:

Remove the GBP from your account. Maybe creating a new account account at Fidelity just for it. And I suspect that you will have to make that one a pure manual account.
Go to a purely manual account and use something like @Tom Young suggested to record it.
On each download "fight/change" what is downloaded to shoehorn it into the suggestion that @Tom Young suggested.

The account setup you have at Fidelity isn't supported because of these two limitations in Quicken Windows US, and I'm quite sure the first one is not going to ever change.

Only one currency per account.
No downloading in a currency other than USD.

asherfamily1

Thanks for all of the suggestions and commentary.

I can understand that Quicken doesn't do currency conversions -- how odd that Quicken supports multi-currency features in Canada but not in the US. That's the power of competition! -- but adding two different currencies is just plain wrong. It's like saying you own 150 shares when you actually own 75 shares of two different companies. They're both shares!!

The concensus seems to be to create a new security. I don't fancy stting up another account at Fidelity so I'm going to give that a try

Thanks again

Chris_QPW

Frankly I think that the reason the Canadian version has better multiple currency support is because it was required, and because the development of it was done by a separate group.

If you realize that Quicken starts out as a US product, and then they modify it on a branch for the Canadian market certain things popup right away. First off the Canadian version is locked into multiple currency support, you can't turn it off.
Why?

Because the easiest way to get support for CAD is just to turn multiple currency support on.
The same comes when you start to do a download, The US product only supports US financial institutions so they never bothered making the OFX code understand anything other than USD. But of course that wouldn't stand in the Canadian product, and if you are going to go in and fix the code to allow CAD you might as well allow any currency.

And it seem like Intuit for the most part said to that other group "do your own thing" and about once or twice a year we will send you our changes and you can put them into yours if they apply.