An approach to the TIPS (Treasury Inflation Protected Securites) valuation problem
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Frustrated123
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It appears that different brokers have different ways of handling TIPS; to my knowledge, none of the ways are satisfactory.
My current broker feeds Quicken the original quantity, and the current market price; so the Quicken value is missing the impact of the cpi adjustment. However, the market value in my brokerage statement does include the impact of the adjustment - as it should.
For the Quicken market value to be correct, I either have to use a higher price, or add more shares. Here's what I do. Note: I assume you do not own TIPS in a taxable account, so I don't have to worry about any potential tax impacts of this approach.
Your error in Quicken is going to be the difference between the market value shown in your brokerage statement and the value that Quicken calculates. If you divide this amount by the price, you get the number of "additional shares" you need to have in order to reflect the impact of the increase in the par value of the TIPS. Basically, I just buy that many additional shares, but at a price of $0. Depending on how you reconcile you can either buy these in the original brokerage account or set up a special, separate account. All reports by security will combine the original shares with the additional shares, and the total value of your TIPS will be correct.
If you only care about your current balances, you just periodically update the number of "additional" shares." However, if you regularly calculate returns on investment, as I do, you might want to do the TIPS calculation each month and make incremental purchases each month.
It's not a lot of work, but maybe too much for some and not for others.
My current broker feeds Quicken the original quantity, and the current market price; so the Quicken value is missing the impact of the cpi adjustment. However, the market value in my brokerage statement does include the impact of the adjustment - as it should.
For the Quicken market value to be correct, I either have to use a higher price, or add more shares. Here's what I do. Note: I assume you do not own TIPS in a taxable account, so I don't have to worry about any potential tax impacts of this approach.
Your error in Quicken is going to be the difference between the market value shown in your brokerage statement and the value that Quicken calculates. If you divide this amount by the price, you get the number of "additional shares" you need to have in order to reflect the impact of the increase in the par value of the TIPS. Basically, I just buy that many additional shares, but at a price of $0. Depending on how you reconcile you can either buy these in the original brokerage account or set up a special, separate account. All reports by security will combine the original shares with the additional shares, and the total value of your TIPS will be correct.
If you only care about your current balances, you just periodically update the number of "additional" shares." However, if you regularly calculate returns on investment, as I do, you might want to do the TIPS calculation each month and make incremental purchases each month.
It's not a lot of work, but maybe too much for some and not for others.
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