Investment Performance Report - Customization - Transfers (Win Quicken DT v47.15)

The Real Dude

My Investment Performance Report (IPR) includes Transfers to Non-Investment accounts. This causes the report to inappropriately reflect investments performance.
1) There is no option on the IPR Advanced tab to handle transfers (as included in some customizations for some other reports.) The Advanced tab has no options on the IPR.
2) I tried modifying the transactions to Xout... without successfully removing them from the report.
3) Since the IPR it is limited to including only investment accounts, I cannot customize to reflect the offsetting activity in the Non-Investment Accounts.
4) I have read many threads (including a few q-lurker responses) regarding this report and others, but cannot find a way to customize the IPR to reflect the offsetting activity or exclude these transactions from my report.

Thus I find the IPR almost useless as the transfers account for significant activity and are basically reported as a return on investment. I have unsuccessfully tried to build a report from scratch.

Does anyone know how to omit the transfer transactions or modify them such that they won't appear on the report?

q_lurker

Explain further why you need to exclude those transfers. Why do you view them as not part of the return from the account?  You may want to expand on the nature of these transfers. For living expenses?  College payments?  Reinvestment elsewhere?

Jim_Harman

As you have observed, the IPR shows the performance of your investment accounts, and does not include other accounts. Can you give an example of the "offsetting activity" in other accounts that you would like to see included in the IPR?

Unless there are significant gains, losses, or interest/dividend earnings in your other accounts, I don't think transfers to or from your investing accounts would affect the IPR results.

The Real Dude

I originally wrote the response below. Then after careful consideration of the way you raised your questions, my analysis has led me to realize that I've been looking at this all wrong. My time frame is too short. It has caused me to think the Annualized return can't be correct. I now realize that to get a good picture of performance, I have to use a longer time frame. If I were to use a single day when the market was up say 1.2%, I'd be getting an Annualized return of 438%. I've done the somewhat the same thing here in that I've only looked at YTD. And as I had noted:
(1.5 months YTD as of now. The uptick in markets, by way of example, QQQ ytd up 12.5%, that would yield almost 103% IRR if comparable increases continued.)

Thank you for your inquiries that led me to get some clarity on the issue.

I've run the report for periods of 1yr for the past 5 years and the results look correct.


-----------Original Response--------------
Response to q_lurker: Looking at Investment Performance - Year to Date. The transfers that have occurred, say in January, consisted of cash already accounted for in a prior year. Some from Dividends. Some funds just from Deposits, in some cases going back years ago. Maybe I'm looking at it all wrong, but I want to see how the performance just in this current period. The transfers Distort that.

Maybe I am really looking at this all wrong. When I remove "No Security", meaning I exclude Cash, from the report, I see that he "Avg Annual Return" shows 86.41%. I had assumed this was wrong because of the magnitude. But looking at the values (Investments - Returns) and then I manually Calculated the Annualized Return, thigs seem to work out mathematically. My supposition is given the short time frame, maybe everything is as it should be, and my time frame is too short to be meaningful. (1.5 months YTD as of now. The uptick in markets, by way of example, QQQ ytd up 12.5%, that would yield almost 103% IRR if comparable increases continued.)

I was seeing an Annual Avg Return of 82.28% when I leave the Cash Transfers in the selection criteria. (That is "No Security" is checked) I guess my thinking was these Returns I'm getting can't be possible but the calculations without Cash seem to make sense to me.

Response to Jim_Harman: The offsetting activity is merely the fact that the funds have been deposited into the other accounts. As indicated above, some of the funds were just deposits in a prior period that have now been withdrawn, thus should not be counted as income. Jim, I may have misunderstood this issue, because those funds are represented in the Beg Mkt Val amount.

Jim_Harman

The IPR does an IRR calculation. As you have observed, the results are annualized, so for a period of less than 1 year like YTD, it assumes any gains and losses will continue at the same rate for a full year. The IRR computation also includes daily compounding. 

If an account starts the year with a combination of securities that change value and cash and you transfer cash in or out of the account, you will find that the full year result depends on how much cash was in the account and how long it was there.

If you want the calculation to ignore the cash in the account, you can un-check the "No security (includes cash)" box on the Securities tab. With this selection, the calculation will only include the performance of the other securities in the account. But this setting will also affect the impact of any transactions such as Bought or Sold that affect the account's cash balance.