R40.23 showing incorrect Day Gain/Loss in Portfolio/Holdings

Dave42

Quicken Home & Business R40.23 Windows:

Since updating to R40.23, some Day Gain/Loss amounts in Portfolio/Holdings are no longer making sense. For new securities entered the same day without a ticker and without any downloaded price updates, the original cost is showing as a gain, when in fact the price has not changed. These values are added into the total and show an inflated portfolio gain amount for the day.

I reported this, but am curious whether anyone else is seeing this.

Jim_Harman

In the situation you describe, the first number in the security's Price History is for the day you made the initial purchase and you are looking at the "Day Gain/Loss" column of a Portfolio view for the purchase date, right?

I can see how that might confuse it. I see the same thing if I set the price to zero for the day before the initial purchase, or the day before any day I look at the Day Gain/Loss. IIRC the Day Gain/Loss is calculated as (Today's shares) * (Today's price - Yesterday's price).

Note that for publicly traded securities, Quicken normally downloads some prices (30 days?) prior to the date you added the security.

Did it behave differently in earlier versions? 

Dave42

> @Jim_Harman said:
> In the situation you describe, the first number in the security's Price History is for the day you made the initial purchase and you are looking at the "Day Gain/Loss" column of a Portfolio view for the purchase date, right?

Correct.

> @Jim_Harman said:
> I can see how that might confuse it. I see the same thing if I set the price to zero for the day before the initial purchase, or the day before any day I look at the Day Gain/Loss. IIRC the Day Gain/Loss is calculated as (Today's shares) * (Today's price - Yesterday's price).
> Note that for publicly traded securities, Quicken normally downloads some prices (30 days?) prior to the date you added the security.

In this case, there is no pre-existing price, since I am providing no Ticker/symbol and updating prices manually. This problem only occurs for newly-created securities, on the day of purchase. There may be other variations of this behaviour (like if I made a second purchase of that same security), but so far, this is the only such problem.

There is no price history, and the only price entry is from the buy transaction. In case you're wondering, this is how I handle Options - I create the Security manually, without a Ticker, and I only update prices manually, and usually only once a week.

> @Jim_Harman said:> Did it behave differently in earlier versions? 

Yes, it behaved differently previously. The Day Gain/Loss used to show a zero gain/loss for a new purchase that did not have a ticker. Going forward, it would show the difference since the last manual price update prior to the current day.

I usually follow my portfolio daily, and it's quite noticeable when you have a significant unexpected gain. And a bit of a letdown when the gain turns out to be a reporting issue :'(

Logically, I would expect the Day gain/loss to be a position's latest market value minus the most recent value for a previous day on which you owned the position (or maybe, minus the current day's opening value instead, if that's available, I'm not sure). Unless it's a new position on the given day - in which case I would expect the gain/loss to be a position's current market value minus the purchase value - and if there has been no price update since the purchase, the current market value is effectively equal to the purchase value, so the result would be zero. It seems to have always behaved this way.

Cheers,
Dave.

q_lurker

I don’t think this is a new problem. 

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7898382/day-gain-loss-shows-huge-loss-on-day-of-purchase

Further as I stated in that cited discussion, I think what you are seeing is a basic reflection of the very simplified approach used for the calculation that is generally inaccurate (misleading) for any change of shares situation. 

Jim_Harman

@dave42,
Quicken does not record opening prices. It saves closing prices in its price history, and if it receives prices from more than one source, it uses a hierarchy to determine which one to keep. See this Help article for more information
https://www.quicken.com/support/how-update-security-prices

If a day has no closing price recorded, it uses the most recent earlier price. Having no previous price is a special case, and I suppose one could argue that it would be better to use today's price rather than zero. Maybe that is what it did in earlier versions.

If you want to work around this problem, you could enter a price for the day before your initial purchase and Quicken will use that price for its Gain/Loss calculation.

Dave42

> @q_lurker said:
> I don’t think this is a new problem. https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7898382/day-gain-loss-shows-huge-loss-on-day-of-purchase
> Further as I stated in that cited discussion, I think what you are seeing is a basic reflection of the very simplified approach used for the calculation that is generally inaccurate (misleading) for any change of shares situation. 

Yes, I think we're describing the same problem. Thanks.

Dave42

> @Jim_Harman said:

> If a day has no closing price recorded, it uses the most recent earlier price. Having no previous price is a special case, and I suppose one could argue that it would be better to use today's price rather than zero. Maybe that is what it did in earlier versions.
>
> If you want to work around this problem, you could enter a price for the day before your initial purchase and Quicken will use that price for its Gain/Loss calculation.

Good to know. But the workaround looks quite tedious - I hope someone is working on a fix.

Thanks.

Jim_Harman

@Dave42,
If you want Quicken to work on this, I recommend you contact Support via phone. Make sure the support agent understands the issue and be sure to get a ticket number for future reference. You should also use the Help > Report a Problem menu in Quicken to submit the issue online.

In your Report a Problem submission, be as clear and thorough as possible and reference the ticket number. Provide step by step instructions to reproduce the problem. You will not get a response to an electronic submission, but they say they review and prioritize the submissions. 

Jiggsee

I have the same problem. It started when I updated 3 days ago to R40.23. Basically the Price History was dropped from some securities, Mutual Funds and hence the starting price was set to zero resulting with incorrect values for "Amount Returned YTD".