Randomly losing old needed price quote history data in Quicken Windows Subscription

rakon107

It appears that Quicken randomly lost historical pricing data for several of my mutual fund and ETF holdings. All my transactions are there, (insert sigh of relief here), but any report I run of net worth or portfolio over time is garbage for times earlier than the oldest remaining pricing data for that security in my Quicken file. I say random loss because some securities have had no price data loss, but others (held many years) have had their historical price data wiped out to have no data points earlier than Nov 2021, and others May 2021. This data loss must have happened recently because earlier this year I was able to run correct value histories back through Jan 2021.

I re-downloaded historical data using the securities list tool to try to fill in this missing data, and it helped somewhat, but the one year data is only weekly, so when a "by month" report hit a midweek "hole" in the data, then it still zeroed out that holding. Weekly reports didn't hit holes, so I guess I could work around, but ...

Any ideas? I am interested is stopping the loss of price data history for my holdings so that I can reliably run reports on my portfolio change in value over time.

I don't know if related but FYI:
- Long term Quicken user, so my QDF is ~34MB
- I use Dropbox to store the QDF so that I can access from either my laptop or desktop Windows PC's
- One of the PC's is Windows 11 (since about Thanksgiving 2021)

Jim_Harman

You should store any active QDF file on a local hard drive, not on a cloud service like Dropbox. If you want to use a different computer to work on your data, you can save a backup to Dropbox and restore the backup on the other computer.

See this Help article
https://www.quicken.com/support/can-i-share-my-quicken-file-between-multiple-computers-using-dropbox

UKR

rakon107 said:

...

- I use Dropbox to store the QDF so that I can access from either my laptop or desktop Windows PC's

...

And that's most likely the cause of your lost or damaged price history data.

After moving your data file to the primary computer's C: - drive, \Documents\Quicken folder and making sure it's NOT accessed by Dropbox or other cloud backup software live while Quicken is open, please consider doing this:

Validate your data file using the Price History repair or rebuild options as needed.

Chris_QPW

Note you can go to an old backup and export the prices using QIF and import that into the new file:
File -> File Export -> QIF File ... -> select Security List

Chris_QPW

UKR said:

Validate your data file using the Price History repair or rebuild options as needed.

Note that since the way it rebuilds the price history is by downloading the historical prices, it will still have the problem of "holes" in the price history.

Jim_Harman

Note also that the "holes" are not read as a zero price. If Quicken is missing price data for a given date, it uses the price from the most recent earlier date.

I agree that the quote provider should always supply month-end data to aid in reconciling to monthly statements, but if it is week-end data. the error should not be large.

rakon107

Thanks everyone!! I really appreciate the help here.

1) I hadn't known about the limitation of working directly from a Dropbox QDF so really appreciate the info and link. It seemed to me like it SHOULD work, but I now know it is not supported so will make adjustments.

2) And thanks for the repair information. Will try that. I don't care about end-month vs. end-week accuracy, so long as I don't have crazy zero-value effects.

3) About the quote data "holes": After I submitted my query, I found that in Portfolio View, Quicken does indeed use the last known quote, so my holding values were never wildly off, i.e., no holdings were ever zero'd in Portfolio view. I tested this by putting in successive dates in the past around where I knew there were still some quote gaps.

BUT, in "By Month Reports", I do still see unexpected large lower value swings at random months, which I have attributed to the "holes". Perhaps another reason, like reports are run differently inside Quicken? -- Not asking support for this, just sharing my experience.

Jim_Harman

If you are seeing random drops in value, I would check the price history for your money market funds. Although the price is always supposed to be 1.00, sometimes it can download as 0.00, which of course will zero out the value of the fund.

The best way to deal with this is to set the price to 1.00 then un-check the Download Quotes box for the money market funds.

rakon107

Thanks again! I found the source of the problem is that some of my quotes -- not just MM's -- had random single dates with zero value price. Until the next non-zero quote, that holding zero'd out in value. Mystery solved! I deleted them manually and all is OK now.