Treasury bond over valued in brokerage account.

Johnaf

I have a PNC brokerage account that include treasury bonds. These show a value that is 100 times greater than actual. My broker says that quicken is probably valuing the bonds based on a share price when it should be valued based on a percentage. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Is it a known issue? Any solution?

Quicken support is no help in three calls. Last session was concluded with the comment that there are known issues with downloads and I should wait for a resolution. Not happy with this answer especially when I don’t see this listed as a known issue.

Jim_Harman

Do you have a ticker symbol assigned to the bond, and do you have the new Real time quotes option at Edit > Preferences > Investments enabled?

Also what share price is being assigned to the bond?

There are reports that when Real time quotes are enabled, Quicken's quote provider assigns securities without ticker symbols bogus prices. The prices sometimes match the price of AAPL, currently about $156.

If this is your issue, please try un-checking the Real time quotes box and/or going to Tools > Security list and un-checking the Download quotes box for the affected securities. This will not prevent correct prices from being downloaded by your broker.

Please let us know if this is your issue and if disabling Download Quotes fixes the problem for you.

Tom Young

"These show a value (in Quicken) that is 100 times greater than actual.  My broker says that quicken is probably valuing the bonds based on a share price when it should be valued based on a percentage."

The value is simply the (number of securities) x (per security price) so although you imply that it's the price that's wrong, is that in fact the case?  Is the number of bonds in Quicken correct? 

Treasuries are usually priced as $XX.XXXX, so what sort of prices are you seeing?  I expect the prices downloaded would be coming from the broker, not Quicken. 

Jim_Harman

I would lean towards @Tom Young's explanation. I missed the fact that the price is off by exactly a factor of 100.

UKR

What's the Security Type you associated that new tbond with?
Don't use Bond. Use CD or something else that fits.

Johnaf

Thanks for the help. I hope the following helps you understand what I am seeing.

My Treasury Bill has a face value of $100,000. Quicken reports that I have 100,000 shares. Quicken reports the price to be $97.70 share which matches my statement. Quicken reports a value of $9,770,000. The real value is $97,700.

I have been told that Treasury bills are priced on a Par system where a price of $100 means 100% of face value and a price of $97.7 means 97.7% of face value.

I have tried selecting different security types (Bond, CD, US savings bond) with no effect.

q_lurker

What transaction in Quicken identified that you have 100,000 shares?  How was that transaction generated?  It should only show 1,000 shares for which you likely paid something under $100 per share. 

Johnaf

I have the account set up for "simple, positions only". I don't see the transactions involved, just the balances. BTW I can edit the number of shares to 1,000 and then I get the correct value but when I do a "Download positions" the shares revert to 100,000 shares.

Chris_QPW

Johnaf said:

I have the account set up for "simple, positions only". I don't see the transactions involved, just the balances. BTW I can edit the number of shares to 1,000 and then I get the correct value but when I do a "Download positions" the shares revert to 100,000 shares.

When using the simple investment mode Quicken is using this part of the OFX information:


If you select Help -> Contact Support -> Log Files -> OFX Log, it will bring up the log and you can save it to a text file, which you can open in Notepad.

If you do an update of just that account, you can do a search from the bottom up for UNITS and you should be able find the right spot pretty quickly.

With this information it should be possible to determine if the financial institution is sending the wrong information or if Quicken is interpreting it incorrectly.

Tom Young

I'd suggest flipping that Account from "Simple" to "Complete" so you can go back and look at whatever transaction established your initial position.  Once you've found it, you might make a backup, delete that transaction, and then re-establish the position using the "Bonds Bought" action.  The entry would look something like this:

Your "Number of bonds" would be 100 and your price would be whatever it actually was for your transaction.  In the "Holdings" view for the Account Quicken would translate that "100" to "1,000" and 1,000 x $97.70 = $97,700.  I'd think that the financial institution would be sending you the correct information but I'd follow up on @Chris_QPW 's suggestion to look in the OFX file to be sure.

IF you are relying on downloads into the Account to automatically enter your investing transactions, (Editorial Comment: a bad idea, in my opinion), then there might be other downloads that accompanied the original buy transaction that might also need to be deleted.

Chris_QPW

Just a bit of a follow up on how I think simple mode works.

Its goal is to keep the number of shares and prices of your securities up to date, along with any cash.
As such, unlike complete mode every time up update it might put in transactions to achieve this.

And that sounds like what is happening.

As example if it is in complete mode, and a buy is done, the buy would be downloaded to Quicken and you would get that transaction.  If you were to delete that transaction or change it, nothing more would be done one the next download as long as there aren't any new transactions, other than maybe warn you that your positions in Quicken don't match what the financial institution has.

Now for simple mode if you make any changes like you did where you change the number of shares, that will put a hidden transaction in the register to do that, but the moment you downloaded again Quicken will look at the information in the OFX data that I point out, and either change a transaction or add another (hidden) to bring the shares and prices to what it thinks are the proper amounts.

Chris_QPW

Oh, and one more thing I noticed, but I'm not totally sure of the full impact.
@UKR mentioned the security type.  I tried changing the security type of a security I had in a buy transaction.  When I set it to Bond and then edited the buy it showed the Bonds Bought dialog.  When I changed it to say CD it showed the standard Buy dialog.  So, it does affect it in that way, but I'm not sure of the overall affect.  Maybe others can put more light on this, but here is what I saw.

I put in a "Bonds Bought" with 10 bonds, and a price of 100, total value $10,000.
In the Holdings it shows 100 shares and a price of 100.  And this didn't change when I flipped the security type.  So, to me it looks like they are always just using shares and price internally, not number of bonds.  And the Bonds Bought dialog just translates those numbers into traditional shares/price.