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Rate of Return on Security Detail & Account Overview

basegad

Why is it that Quicken only has total rate of return for a security on a separate report or on the Investing tab and NOT on the Account Overview and/or Security Detail View where it would be useful? I'm not talking about the Div Yield based on current market price or % Gain, but the total return from income and realized/unrealized gain/loss on a position.

Quicken needs to make the investment area of the product better or I am done with it. I don't need Bill Pay and all the other junk. I need good portfolio tracking!

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Jim_Harman

You need to be really specific about what you mean when you say "total rate of return."

Quicken's best performance indicators IMO are the "Avg. Annual Return (%)" columns in the Investing Portfolio views and also the Investment Performance Report. You can customize these to be calculated by account, security, or other groupings, and you can choose which accounts and securities to include in the calculations. They show the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) for the selected accounts or securities.

The Portfolio views show the IRR for 1, 3, and 5 years, plus YTD (not very useful because it is an annualized return). You can also see these returns for selected accounts and securities at the bottom of the Investing > Performance page.

On the report you can select any period you want.

Vince_L

I purchased a Quicken Premier Subscription because I was looking for a Portfolio aggregator that was not in the cloud. I wanted to download data from my brokerage houses and banks, so that it could tell me what my portfolio % (growth or loss) was at any time during the year (YTD).
In the past, I have done this manually with a pretty detailed excel spreadsheet that I developed. The goal here was so that I could have the Quicken software do it for me. I have tried 2 online portfolio aggregators that have agreed with my spreadsheet to within a tenth of a percent.
For Quicken, between all the issues that I have read about with “RETURN (%) YTD” which is annualized and gives me all “N/A” and the issues with “ROI (%)” which is correct for each of my securities/mutual funds, but completely wrong at the account level which lowers the entire portfolio by quite a bit. I am not sure what to do to just get a readout of portfolio % YTD ?? Even your free competitors do this flawlessly and from what I have read neither of these issues have been fixed by Quicken for years! Any thoughts?

Also, how do I get plain interest (Bank CD) included in the portfolio performance calculations? It’s included in the tax estimates.

Sherlock

Vince_L said:

I purchased a Quicken Premier Subscription because I was looking for a Portfolio aggregator that was not in the cloud. I wanted to download data from my brokerage houses and banks, so that it could tell me what my portfolio % (growth or loss) was at any time during the year (YTD).
In the past, I have done this manually with a pretty detailed excel spreadsheet that I developed. The goal here was so that I could have the Quicken software do it for me. I have tried 2 online portfolio aggregators that have agreed with my spreadsheet to within a tenth of a percent.
For Quicken, between all the issues that I have read about with “RETURN (%) YTD” which is annualized and gives me all “N/A” and the issues with “ROI (%)” which is correct for each of my securities/mutual funds, but completely wrong at the account level which lowers the entire portfolio by quite a bit. I am not sure what to do to just get a readout of portfolio % YTD ?? Even your free competitors do this flawlessly and from what I have read neither of these issues have been fixed by Quicken for years! Any thoughts?

Also, how do I get plain interest (Bank CD) included in the portfolio performance calculations? It’s included in the tax estimates.

Your posts read as if you think your communicating with Quicken employees. You're not. This is a Quicken user community. If you want to contact Quicken Support, I suggest you review: https://www.quicken.com/support/quicken-support-options

If you're looking for an explanation as to how Quicken performs its investment calculations, I suggest you review: https://help.quicken.com/display/WIN/Tell+me+about+key+investment+performance+calculations+used+in+Quicken

Note: Return (%) YTD is obtained from a third-party provider using the ticker symbol.

If you want to handle Bank CDs as investments, I suggest you create pseudo-securities for the CD. and enter their purchase and interest payments in an investment register.

Jim_Harman

Quicken's Return (%) numbers are downloaded along with the quote data and are not based on your transactions.

One way to get useful YTD performance data is use the Investment Performance Report and set the date range to Yearly and Current year. This does an annualized IRR calculation from 1/1 to 12/31 of the current year, so the underlying assumption is that share prices will remain flat for the rest of the year. For securities with varying prices, this is usually more realistic than doing a YTD IRR, which assumes that share prices will continue to change at the same rate for the rest of the year.

I have the same issue as you do with the account level ROI. See this discussion.
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20048358

To include a bank CD account in the performance calculations, you can tell Quicken to treat it as an investing account by going to the account details for the account. Click on the Display Options tab and set the Account Intent to Investment.

Vince_L

Thanks! But even per the IRR calculation above, I have simple individual securities (new) with 1 transaction this year that are off as much as .5%. Are they making any assumptions on future reinvested dividends until 12/31?

As far as your CD suggestion with classifying to an investment account, I had done this and it does not work. Quicken mentioned to me that when it’s imported as a Bank (Account Type: Checking), the interest is not included under investment performance but it is included on tax projections.

This is totally frustrating and Quicken is getting left in the dust here!

Jim_Harman

When you say "off as much as .5%," what are you comparing Quicken's calculations to?

If you use the Investment Performance Report (IPR) as I described - date range of Yearly/Current year - it does not make assumptions about future performance or distributions, it assumes the value will not change for the rest of the year.

Say you have a security that starts the year with a value of $1,000 and you have no purchases or sales other than reinvested dividends. On March 14 (1/5 of the way into the year) the value is $1,100. With the Yearly/Current year setting, the assumption is that the value will still be $1,100 at the end of the year and thus the IRR is 10%.

If you set the date range to YTD, Quicken will assume that the YTD performance will continue for the rest of the year so the value at the end of the year will be about $1,500 for an IRR of more than 50%, because the IRR assumes daily compounding.

The first option is generally best for securities where the price varies, the second is better for fixed-price securities. Even better, look at the Last 12 months rather than YTD.

Quicken's ROI (%) YTD is accurate in most cases for individual securities but as noted above is less useful on the account level. It is not annualized and does not assume any compounding.

Vince_L

Thanks, the IPR should work fine for the portfolio, accounts and individual securities. My big issue is that I have consolidated accounts this year, so some of my accounts had no balance on 1/1/2021. This will be different next year.