Increase Number of Investing Goals

drinian

I make heavy use of investing goals, but the number is limited. Currently I have used up all the ones that Quicken allows. I would like to see the number doubled.

NotACPA

How many does Q allow? And why can't you reuse some, such as GROWTH for multiple investments?

Rocket J Squirrel

Tell you what, @drinian : I will vote for your idea if you explain why 15 isn't enough and maybe show some examples of your specialized goals.

drinian

I am constructing new portfolios all the time with various combos of ETFs, stocks, bonds, CDs, etc. I label them A, B, C, etc. and run R simulations on them looking at momentum, simple moving averages and other approaches I'm always thinking of new combos as I run my simulations, so I have quickly run out of "investing goals" which is how I keep track of them. For example, investing goal "A" is a combo of ETFs across all the major industrial sectors of the US economy. Goal "B" is similar but a different set of ETFs for those sectors. Goal "C" is for a buy & hold portfolio of major asset classes such as Meb Faber uses in his book on the Ivy Portfolio. And so on. In Quicken I can track the various investment goals I have actually invested in and see how they compare with one another. I'm always thinking of new portfolio ideas, so 15 is simply not enough for me.

Rocket J Squirrel

This seems like an odd use of the feature, and probably unique to you. But hard-coded limits are bad, so I will vote for this.

Jim_Harman

There may be a benefit from having more Investing Goals available, but I see some issues with the approach of using Investing Goals to select securities for model portfolios.

One issue is that each security can only have one investing goal. I would think that one thing you would want to do when constructing models would be to re-use securities in different combinations, and this approach would not support that.

Also when comparing performance, it is important to include dividends and other distributions, and i don't see how defining Investing Goals would do that.

I think a better approach would be to set up offline accounts containing the selected securities and mark them Separate so they do not affect your net worth and other reports. You can have as many of these accounts as you want.

We can expand on this approach in a separate discussion if you are interested.

drinian

@Jim_Harman, I would be interested in your suggestion. I'm not sure what you mean about offline accounts. Are these "dummy" accounts not tied to a bank or CC, etc? What does it mean to mark them "separate"?

Jim_Harman

I have created a new post on this topic here:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7935812/using-quicken-to-model-investment-strategies