Problem with huge incorrect historical balance in investment account

longtimeuser70

I download information about investment accounts at Schwab on a regular basis. One of these accounts showed a HUGE (several million $) above the actual balance. In the portfolio view, this huge difference appears shortly after the account was opened in 2020. It disappears in a step function, ending about October 2021. There are no transactions in the account record that show me what happened. And, on the Schwab website this anomaly never appeared.The balance shown at Schwab's website was always correct.

I found this problem when doing a net worth over time report, immediately recognizing there was an issue with the historical net worth, which I traced to this one account. I had never noticed this before, and my Quicken sidebar with the balances of all my accounts has never showed this problem that I know of. (I do not regularly look at the portfolio view of the investment accounts in Quicken.)

I would like to fix this, as the net worth over time is distorted and essentially useless.

Any recommendations?

jacobs

I wonder if you had some stock(s) which had splits or mergers which should have but didn't change the historical pricing of the security.

If you're sure there are no transactions corresponding to the dates the portfolio has a jump in price, then I would look at your holdings just before and after one of these dates to see if there is a big jump in price. It could be you'll just need to fix the security price history to resolve what you're seeing. 

longtimeuser70

An interesting idea. I did check, but this account holds high grade corporate bonds, so I did not expect to find anything, and didn't.

jacobs

Hmmm. Either the number of shares held or the price has to have changed to make the value drop. Did you have any bonds which reached maturity on these dates? I would zero in on one of the dates and examine the security quantities and prices on the day before and day after a change to get a handle on what actually changed. 

longtimeuser70

Thanks. Again, over the full period in question, the Schwab data is consistently in below $500K range. Only Quicken shows balance of well over $3M with no supporting transactions, and a step-wise return to the correct balance in October 2021. This appears to be a Quicken anomaly, not something that was a quick value change in my account.

jacobs

I understand it's an issue in Quicken, and specifically something in your data which is incorrect. Quicken doesn't just make up a market value out of thin air; it's a product of shares x price, so either the number of shares or price have to be wrong in the past for one or more of your securities. 

longtimeuser70

I could not find any data that was incorrect. I never manually updated this account; everything was downloaded from Schwab. The account looks normal on the Schwab site, and has huge unexplained balance increases on Quicken.

I deleted the account and re-connected it and the problem disappeared.

jacobs

longtimeuser70 said:

I could not find any data that was incorrect. I never manually updated this account; everything was downloaded from Schwab.

Security prices download from a service provider Quicken uses, not just Schwab, and sometimes prices can be wrong.

longtimeuser70 said:

I deleted the account and re-connected it and the problem disappeared.

I'm glad you were able to get the issue resolved.