Add ticker symbols for U.S. Treasury savings bond redemption values

[Deleted User]

Quicken can download current and historical prices for certain securities using One-Step Update. (Refer to "How do I update security prices (get quotes)?" in the documentation.) Each security is identified by a unique ticker symbol, which is used when retrieving the prices.

The U.S. Treasury provides a data feed [1] containing the redemption values for Series I and Series EE savings bonds. The data assumes a bond with a $25 denomination; then the redemption value over time depends only on the month and year the bond was issued [2]. The values are presented the same way they would be in TreasuryDirect: the early withdrawal penalty is included for bonds less than 5 years old, and no value is given for bonds less than 1 year old which cannot be redeemed.

Please use this data to create tickers for savings bonds in Quicken's security pricing service (so that these prices do not have to be added manually). For example, a $10,000 series I bond purchased in January 2020 would simply be entered into Quicken as an investment purchase of 400 shares in ticker "TREAS:I-2020-01". Quicken would download share price data for ticker "TREAS:I-2020-01" automatically and update the redeemable value of the bond over time. The share price for this ticker would be as follows:

- $25.00 on 1/1/2020
- $25.36 on 1/1/2021
- $25.39 on 2/1/2021
- $25.41 on 3/1/2021
- $25.44 on 4/1/2021

etc. If this was a series EE bond instead (sold at half its face value), the share prices for ticker "TREAS:EE-2020-01" would be:

- $12.50 on 1/1/2020
- $12.51 on 1/1/2021
- $12.51 on 2/1/2021
- $12.52 on 3/1/2021
- $12.52 on 4/1/2021

(These examples value the bond at its purchase price during the first year, before it can be redeemed.)

[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/savings-bond-value-files/savings-bonds-value-files

[2] The U.S. Treasury actually treats all savings bonds as a fractional multiple of a $25 bond. This is how it calculates interest.

Jim_Harman

Note that Quicken's quote data comes from a 3rd party supplier. Quicken would have to pay the supplier to construct this data if they do not already support it. Note that the supplier's data only goes back 5 years.

You could download the data in CSV format for the bonds you own and manipulate it in Excel to produce a CSV file that you can import to Quicken. I can see that this would be useful if you own several bonds and/or you want to reconstruct the price history for several years.

[Deleted User]

> @Jim_Harman said:
> Quicken would have to pay the supplier to construct this data if they do not already support it.

No, actually they wouldn't. This data is downloadable directly from U.S. Treasury servers, who says [1] that

"The data is offered free, without restriction, and available to copy, adapt, redistribute, or otherwise use for non-commercial or commercial purposes."


Quicken literally just needs to add some code that connects to the U.S. Treasury, requests the correct data, and then handles what it gets back. (This would be done separately from their other securities data, which they obtain from a third party.)

[1] https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/api-documentation/#license-and-authorization