Need better support for deleting securities

rbsorensen

I trade options frequently which creates a lot of entries in the security list (I have hundreds and can't get rid of old ones).

Quicken may not be willing to provide better support for option trading, but what could help is to provide a better way to delete unwanted securities, as it is very hard and time-consuming to do so, particularly for hidden accounts. And if you want to retain the transactions it's currently impossible to delete a security.

A solution to this would be to modify the "Delete Security" function to automatically rename the security to a fixed value, such as "Deleted Security" as well as automatically setting a memo field in the transaction to the original security name. In that way the database links could be maintained and transactions for deleted securities would show up in one place. The Delete button would then be available for all securities which are not listed in any active portfolio account.

NotACPA

I'd vote NO if I could.  rbsorensen  needs software designed for Options trading and frequent trading.

Q isn't it ... and  has been previously told this.

Chris_QPW

I don’t think you understand the relationship between the security and the transactions, and such.  The security is going to be “pointer” into all the data that goes with that security, that is the transactions, price history, and such.  Merging all of that together would create a total mess.

I agree with @NotACPA Quicken was never designed for Options/active trading and it is the wrong tool for the job.

Jim_Harman

One thing you can do is rename the unused securities so they begin with "z-" so they sort to the end of the list. This does not delete them, but at least it gets them out of the way.

q_lurker

At least one experienced user has a policy of naming the option security less definitively and the re-using the same security for multiple options with different dates and strike prices. 

Jim_Harman

For other ideas on how to deal with expired options and their related securities, see this discussion.
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20140199

Chris_QPW

Jim_Harman said:

For other ideas on how to deal with expired options and their related securities, see this discussion.
https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20140199

I notice this approach deals with the problem by deleting transactions (through deleting accounts after moving active positions to another one).

One thing I didn’t really address in my original post is the main reason such request usually are requested, performance.

And when deciding on how to deal with the problem one has to understand why it is there in the first place.

I seen many people blame the old database for such things, but as best I can tell it isn’t the problem.  One indicator of this is that you can run reports on tons of investment data and still get pretty good performance.

So, that leads to the question of what really is slowing things down in the registers.  I attribute it to two things.  One is that they seem to be doesn’t all the calculations on the fly, so as you get more securities and security lots the calculations go up, but even this doesn’t seem like the main problem.  I have looked at the underline controls of the investment account, and I believe it is very much a whole bunch of individual controls that are slow to update and don’t implement functions like virtual rows in an efficient manner.  That is a long way to say that I believe this is a GUI problem, but note that the investment account register controls are so complicated and Quicken is so dependent on how they work, I don’t expect any kind of “rewrite” of them.

To give an example, the Quicken Windows developers finally gave “multiple select” for some edit functions.  One would have expected them to put that in the register, but that implies a real set of controls that can support that kind of thing, which is far from what the investment register controls are.  This is the reason it took them so long to implement “multiple select”.  It took thinking outside of the box.

They implemented it by creating a whole new window with a proper list that supports multiple select.  And this new functionality gives rise to my belief about the GUI being the problem.  If one tries to change transactions you can notice a lag even for one transaction, that gets worse when there are more transactions/securities/security lots.  On the other hand, if you use the new window you can edit/delete hundreds of transactions in a split second.  If the database was the problem you wouldn’t see that kind of behavior.

Rocket J Squirrel

I agree with the thread title "Need better support for deleting securities." But I find the discussion overly complicated. Rename them all "Deleted Security"? I can't vote for that.

I would gladly vote for either of these simple solutions:

• A way to multiple-select unused securities for simultaneous deletion
• A new Quicken command "Delete all unused securities"

Where "unused" means "does not appear in any transactions."

Jim_Harman

Rocket J Squirrel said:

• A new Quicken command "Delete all unused securities"

Where "unused" means "does not appear in any transactions."

... and is a not a Market Index and is not on the Watch List

Rocket J Squirrel

Jim_Harman said:

... and is a not a Market Index and is not on the Watch List

Good point.