Is it possible to suppress the warning message when running IRR performance reports?

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bijansd
bijansd Member ✭✭
edited November 2022 in Reports (Windows)
I would like to revisit a previous post from Oct. 2019:

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How to suppress the warning: Quicken cannot provide complete and meaningful IRR values...

I understand what this warning is trying to tell me. After now seeing this hundreds of times, I want to disable it from showing. Is there a way?
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I have a large number of various securities in my Quicken history and I am attempting to create a spreadsheet with all historical annual returns. To simplify the task of reporting investment performance for a large number of individual securities I am choosing a Date range of "Include all dates" and then I Subtotal by "Year". My Date range is approximately 1993 - 2022 (present). Most of my holdings are between a few years to more than 15 years old. If I run the Investment Performance report with "Include all dates" it inevitably displays this annoying message that I have to click "OK" to dismiss every time I run the report. I will always get meaningful data that is relevant to my task of collecting all the annual results (I can easily discard the years that don't fully calculate, but the years in between are very meaningful to me). Getting the same error over and over when running this report without being able to choose to no longer see it displayed is simply insane.

Is there some way to suppress this error?

I realize I could change the Date range to fix the issue by only including the relevant years for a particular security, but this is tedious and makes no difference in the resulting IRRs that are reported.

Can this be fixed?

Thanks,

Bijan
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  • Frankx
    Frankx SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
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    Hi @bijansd

    As you note above, this issue has been raised at least once before, and you understand why the warning appears, so it clearly is redundant to you and perhaps other users.  I don't know of a workaround, except to change the years, which you note would be tedious for a large number of reports.

    One thing I can suggest would be that you start an "Product Idea" post here in the Q Community.  Such posts bring the issue to the attention of not only other users but also to the Quicken moderators who monitor this forum.  Here's a LINK to the section on Investment Ideas.

    Good luck!

    Frankx

                            Quicken Home, Business & Rental Property - Windows 10-Home Version

                                             - - - - Quicken User since 1984 - - - 
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Answers

  • Frankx
    Frankx SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
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    Hi @bijansd

    As you note above, this issue has been raised at least once before, and you understand why the warning appears, so it clearly is redundant to you and perhaps other users.  I don't know of a workaround, except to change the years, which you note would be tedious for a large number of reports.

    One thing I can suggest would be that you start an "Product Idea" post here in the Q Community.  Such posts bring the issue to the attention of not only other users but also to the Quicken moderators who monitor this forum.  Here's a LINK to the section on Investment Ideas.

    Good luck!

    Frankx

                            Quicken Home, Business & Rental Property - Windows 10-Home Version

                                             - - - - Quicken User since 1984 - - - 
      -  If you find this reply helpful, please click "Helpful" (below), so others will know! Thank you.  -

  • Tom Young
    Tom Young SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
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    I'd never even attempted to do what you describe but, prompted by your post, I gave it a shot. My investing window stretches further back in time than yours.
    First I did a Performance Report specifying all Accounts (including hidden), all dates and all securities (including hidden).  That report completed properly.  (Not that I necessarily believe the Average Annual Return reported, but it did complete.)  Then I subtotaled that report by year, and the report completed properly.  Finally, I did another customization narrowing the report to reporting on only one security, and the report completed properly again.
    So I don't think that the issue here is the subtotaling by year.
  • Jim_Harman
    Jim_Harman SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
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    It sounds like @bijansd is running Investment Performance reports for one security at a time with the date range set to "include all dates" and subtotaling by year. If you are an active trader, you could for example use this data to compare your personal returns to published data on the corresponding securities.

    For any years where you did not hold the security at any time during the year, the IRR can't be calculated and shows as NA in the report. You also have to click through a lengthy error dialog. It would certainly be nice if there were a "Do not show again" option for this message.

    Note also that if you did not hold the security for the full year, the IRR in the report may be unexpectedly high or low. This is because the calculation is annualized, so it implicitly assumes that the trend while you held the security would have continued for the full year.

    Also because of the annualization, I recommend that rather than setting the date range to Include all dates, you set the ending date to 12/31/2022 to more accurately show the YTD return.
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  • bijansd
    bijansd Member ✭✭
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    I appreciate all the replies to my question. I wasn't expecting a response so soon. I've submitted this as a Product Idea per the suggestion from @Frankx - thanks.

    As for my spreadsheet "project", I've got about 260+ securities that I want to include. Yes, it will take me some time to capture all the historical annualized returns for all securities into one spreadsheet, but I see this as a "one-time" effort (that I probably should have started over 15 years ago). Unfortunately, that means I'll have to view this silly error message (and click "OK") at least another 200+ times.

    Once complete, my plan going forward will be to continue to update the annual returns only for the most current year which should keep this error message "at bay" for the foreseeable future! :-) Still, the display of this error message could have been managed more intelligently, no? Maybe my Product Idea will garner some upvotes and cause some "meaningful" change? We can only be so hopeful, but I'm not holding my breath... Thanks!
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