Bond Market Value is Zero

System

This discussion was created from comments split from: Bond market value calculation.

James J

Hmm, well, I just realized I have some bonds with a market value of zero.

So . . . this is a bug?  I know I wasn't missing this money a couple months ago when I last checked.  This is not user error but a program glitch?  (Quite the glitch for a program whose raison d'etre is finance management, kind of like a designing a boat that don't float!)

This has got to be something I did, no?

Chris_QPW

@James J Did you also notice that the Cost Basis and the Gain/Loss?  Clearly if you have a loss equal to your cost basis you have no market value.  The big question is why do you have a loss equal to your cost basis?

James J

@Chris_QPW Yeah it's strange.  There is a loss exactly equal to the cost basis because Quicken has no value for "Quote/Price".  So Quicken is calculating the price per share as $0, making the bonds literally valueless.

I really don't know how that could have happened.  These are part of a collection of bonds and CDs that comprise a bond/cd ladder, so there's a bit of buying and selling as the bonds come due and I buy the next rung in the ladder.  I've had it for a few years.  I look at the total value of the ladder every week or two, at the most.  If I'm missing $16-20k it stands out to me, so whatever happened with the price per must have happened fairly recently.  Based on maturity dates of the affected bonds, I don't think I bought all of them recently.

 Even if I made an error somewhere when I bought the bonds, shouldn't Quicken pull the most recent price per share when it gets data from E*Trade?

Chris_QPW

@James J I'm a Quicken Windows user so I will have to leave that up to a Quicken Mac expert to answer your question.  But yeah, if somehow you get zero for the quote, that makes sense why it is reported that way.

James J

@Chris_QPW Am I in the Mac forums? I didn’t realize that. I too am on windows.   I wasn’t paying attention when I tacked onto this thread. My issue seemed similar to the OP’s to the extent that Quicken did not correctly get the current price of my bond’s from ETrade when I pulled data from the bank/broker. 

Chris_QPW

@James J yes, this is a Quicken Mac thread.  I will ask the moderators to move your post to a Windows category.

q_lurker

@James J. Through Security Details / More access the price history for the bond. There have been scattered reports of manually entered security prices disappearing under a recent program update. R46 I believe. What release are you using?  

If that is your problem - prices lost - you might need to back off to an earlier release like R44.28 and restore a backup from earlier as well. 

I have not read enough comments about this issue to more fully understand all the possibilities. 

James J

@q_lurker I am on version R47.11

The missing price per share problem was fairly easy to diagnose and fairly easy to fix.  The very first thing I did, was go to the broker's website and check what was there!  At first I thought maybe I'd inadvertently used the wrong account to pay the mortgage or something like that.

You can go into the details of a bond or stock and change the share price there.  I also found that, within Quicken, I can go to the brokerage account registry, click the "Holdings" button at the top left, and from the Account Overview window that opens I can edit the share price.

q_lurker

The concern was that you should have had a price from the purchase of the bond and possibly later updates. The history should not have been empty leading to a $0 unit cost. Was that the case?  Did you lose data?