Total return on stocks

Question

When I enter a stock that I buy and dividends, I cannot acces to the metric total rerturn on that stock (= (dividends plus gain on value)/purchase value. Is it accessible?

Sammy670 · Answer

Thanks!

jacobs · Answer

@Sammy670  So you're saying neither Gain nor ROI nor IRR give you the performance metric you're looking for, right? You want to see your Gain/Loss without your dividend reinvestments included in your Cost Basis? Or put another way: Gain/Loss plus Dividends?

You can get there… but it'll take a little work. In your transaction register, filter for "Dividend" so you only have the Dividend Income and Reinvest Dividend transactions. You can also filter by date range if you're interested in a limited time period. Make sure you have the "Invest Amt" column visible; this is the amount of each dividend transaction. Unfortunately, there's no way to total the column in Quicken, so you need to Export the register to a CSV file, open it in any spreadsheet, and sum the Invest Amt column. Add that to the Gain/Loss showing in your Quicken portfolio view, and you'll have Gain/Loss plus dividends.

If there's an easier way to see the value you want, hopefully someone else will jump in and post.