Best way to track Bitcoin in Coinbase

Perry Smith

Hi Gang, I came here first and I haven't played around and experimented with Quicken.

I have a Fidelity account and it is somehow connected to my Coinbase account but I've yet to see it in the user interface. I just now created a Coinbase account a few days ago, have it verified with my checking, transferred money and bought some bitcoin today. I'm viewing it as an investment.

Last message on this site says that I can not hook Quicken to my Coinbase account. I'm not sure if that is still true. I also tried to add BTC-USD, which is the symbol that Yahoo uses, as a security but didn't manage to add it.

The general question is how best to do this? Someone mentioned that I can download transactions as a file (I forget what Quicken calls this) and then load it into Quicken. That's fine. This account will have very few trades but I'm hoping I can track it as an investment.

Thank you all in advance... I hope you all have a pleasant holiday season.

Quicken Jasmine

Hi @Perry Smith,

Thank you for coming to the community with this question. Quicken calls this file a 'QFX' and you should be able to see some sort of icon on your FI account's website that says download file, share, etc. Where you can download the QFX file and then upload it into Quicken. 

I hope that this helps, if not, then feel free to reach out with any further questions. 

Happy Holidays!
Quicken Jasmine

jacobs

@Perry Smith Quicken in general has not yet incorporated features for tracking cryptocurrencies, but they have stated that they are working on it. One of the major needs is changing Quicken's investment tracking from 6 to 8 decimal places, an extensive internal change that goes across the Quicken Mac, Quicken Windows and Quicken Cloud (mobile app and web interface) products. 

I'm not sure I understand the relation between your Coinbase account and your Fidelity account, but if Fidelity can download information, you may be able to get it into Quicken. But my guess is that you need data from Coinbase. From what I can see, Coinbase exports CSV files, but not the QFX files required by Quicken Mac. There are third-party converter applications on the market for turned CSV files into QFX files, but I can't attest to how well they work, or whether they work for this particular data you want to track.

However, Coinbase does show up as an account you can connect to in Quicken Mac:

My guess is that it can provide your current investment amount but not detailed transactions, under Quicken's "Simple Tracking" method for investment accounts. I don't have an account, so you'll have to try to create such an account in Quicken and connect to Coinbase to see what you get.

Perry Smith

> @jacobs said:
> @Perry Smith Quicken in general has not yet incorporated features for tracking cryptocurrencies, but they have stated that they are working on it. One of the major needs is changing Quicken's investment tracking from 6 to 8 decimal places, an extensive internal change that goes across the Quicken Mac, Quicken Windows and Quicken Cloud (mobile app and web interface) products. 
>
> I'm not sure I understand the relation between your Coinbase account and your Fidelity account, but if Fidelity can download information, you may be able to get it into Quicken. But my guess is that you need data from Coinbase. From what I can see, Coinbase exports CSV files, but not the QFX files required by Quicken Mac. There are third-party converter applications on the market for turned CSV files into QFX files, but I can't attest to how well they work, or whether they work for this particular data you want to track.
>
> However, Coinbase does show up as an account you can connect to in Quicken Mac:
>
> My guess is that it can provide your current investment amount but not detailed transactions, under Quicken's "Simple Tracking" method for investment accounts. I don't have an account, so you'll have to try to create such an account in Quicken and connect to Coinbase to see what you get.

Re: Fidelity account -- I don't understand it either. It seems to be a view.

If you go down the Coinbase path, it asks for an API Key and Secret. You can create the API Key and Secret. I did that two days ago. There is a 48 hour wait period. I just now set up Coinbase in Quicken. In my case, it found 3 wallets. They are in "Simple Tracking mode":

https://help.quicken.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=21922000

Coinbase is confusing to me... There is Coinbase and Coinbase Pro. I stumbled around and created an account in each before I got help from Coinbase to understand that they are basically two system with some common attributes such as your id and password. In any case, the 3 wallets found did not include the Coinbase Pro wallets. I created an API Key and Secret under the pro account but it isn't working. I will try again in two days to see if it works but it might need to target pro.coinbase.com instead of Coinbase.com.

In any case, there does seem to be progress. I am mentioning the Coinbase Pro site to give the developers a heads up to add it to their ToDo List. I'm sure it's long.

It sounds like a serious investor will prefer the Pro side of things. The transaction fees are less and there is more sophisticated trades possible.

Happy Holidays to all!

jacobs

Perry Smith said:

I am mentioning the Coinbase Pro site to give the developers a heads up to add it to their ToDo List. I'm sure it's long.

Thanks for posting your update and additional information. It's interesting to read how this is progressing.

As for your post to the developers, I'm sorry to say that they don't read posts on this site, so they won't see it. And as for Coinbase, Quicken will access whatever Coinbase enables Quicken to access; the process of adding more financial institutions or types of services depends on the outside party, not Quicken.

Perry Smith

Is there an official way to get suggestions to the developers? I was going to post a suggestion that an iOS widget be done so I can monitor all of my investments at a glance. Mac folks tend to be Apple folks and they would tend to use iOS devices. Wouldn't it be fun to look at your watch and see how much money you have lost in the stock market today???? And then that could be tied into the Activity app so on bad days you would need to exercise more to make up for the lost money.

jacobs

@Perry Smith Are you aware there is a Quicken mobile app? Are you wanting additional features that you can't get in the app? 

Perry Smith

@jacobs Yes. A widget sits on the Home Screen and (I guess) can make queries to outside server. The classic widget is "Weather" so you can just glance at the Home Screen of you iPhone and see the status of various things such as the weather, the state of your ear bud battery, the current stock tickers, etc.

Quicken September

Hi, @Perry Smith! 

Thank you for reaching out with your updates and your idea! We do have a process for creating and voting for ideas here in the Community. To do so, please check out this post. Here, you'll find the channels through which you may create and vote for ideas! I hope this is helpful. Thank you!

-Quicken September

jacobs

Ah, sorry, I didn't grasp that you meant a specific iOS widget like that. You can create a new post in the mobile app Product Ideas sub-category of this forum to make the case for it and to allow other users to vote if they'd like to such a feature feature. The more votes these idea posts get, the more likely the developers are to implement them.

Personally, I can't imagine most people would want their financial details viewable on their home screen without even logging into their phone, but maybe I'm wrong. I'm also not a fan of tracking my machinations of the markets every hour or every day, since it rarely helps you make good investment decisions; but there are folks who day trade and I'm sure will disagree completely.

Perry Smith

With Face ID, the log in to your phone is almost instant but only you (they claim) can do that.

When I had a job, I would not look at my savings / investments much at all. I was with ???? Share; someone bought them out and then E*Trade bought them out... Anyhow, it was set up to pull money and buy stock each month so I didn't watch it. As you say, watching it makes me tempted to muck with it and that's always a mistake.

But now I'm retired and I just get curious how things are going through the day. I probably need to find more hobbies.