"Update Historical Prices" Issue
On 3/27/23 one of my mutual funds - PIMCO CommodityRealReturn Strategy Fund Institutional Class (PCRIX) - had a 3 to 1 reverse split. This seems to have caused a problem with the Historical Pricing in Quicken. As far as I can see, the daily prices from the price feed are passing the correct price. But, when you update historical prices, using the "Update Historical prices", it updates the fund with incorrect "Split" prices before the split date of 3/27/23.
From 7/31/18 through 6/30/22 it updated the incorrect price monthly, at month end.
From 7/1/22 through 1/27/23 it updated the incorrect price weekly on Fridays.
There were also some incorrect prices on 3/7/23 and 3/10/23.
The prices are all correct after 3/10/23.
The only thing I can think of is that I must have done an "Update Historical Price" after the 3 to 1 reverse split on 3/27/23.
What clued me that there was an issue is when I saw the "wacky" price history graph for the fund:
To fix the prices, I downloaded all the prices for the fund to a spreadsheet, corrected the wrong prices, then created a CSV price file, and then uploaded it to Quicken.
Here is the price history graph after uploading the corrected prices:
The graphs are not "split adjusted" so to clearly show the change in price due to the 3 to 1 reverse split on 3/27/23.
This is definitely something that Quicken should look at. I just happen to notice the discrepancy by seeing this graph. I am sure there are other Quicken users that might have a pricing issue, but don't realize it.
Until Quicken fixes this pricing error I think users should be proceed with caution when using the "Update Historical Price" feature in Quicken
Comments
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Updated Historical Prices updates the split-adjusted historical prices. That is not what you want in your Quicken records since the StkSplt transaction will duplicate that adjustment. Unfortunately, Quicken’s data supplier and most reporting feeds such as Yahoo Finance also present prices that way. Similar adjustments may occur around corporate spin-offs.
If you already have prices in place, the downloaded historical prices should not override them. (Exceptions exist. There is a defined hierarchy for security price sources.)
The pattern of dated prices you cite is consistent with historical price downloads - daily for the last month (30 days), end of week for the 11 months prior, and end of month for the prior four years giving a full 5-year range.
I have reported the issue to Quicken multiple times over the years with no action taken. I appreciate their difficulty in addressing the issue. Your words of caution are valid.
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Your explanation makes sense, and is understandable, but what is bothersome is that I had prices in there initially before I did the "Update Price History". When I did the price download to Excel to correct the prices, the correct prices were there with the incorrect prices only on the dates that I described in my post. The correct prices were all there for the month, except for the last day of the month. That had the incorrect price. That tells me that the incorrect price overlaid the correct one on the last day of the month.
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The hierarchy:
- Manual price entry
- Current Price (Quote)
- Historical Price (Quote)
- Price downloaded with broker data through One Step Update or Update Now
- Import Price (CSV)
- Transaction Price entered when manually entering a transaction in the brokerage account list.
Each entry method overrides the price(s) received by the method just below it. This means that the price displayed after entering a Buy transaction (for example) would be replaced by the price imported from a CSV downloaded from an investing site (such as Yahoo! Finance), which would be replaced by the price transmitted by the broker when performing One Step Update, and so forth.
Two points to note:
- Your CSV imported prices are subject to being overwritten again by a later historical price updates.
- if your prior entries were from prior 'regular' current quote updates, the historical data should NOT have taken precedence. That becomes very concerning. Can you tie any of this to a particular program release?
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I know now why the Historical Prices were able to overlay the existing prices. In late March I rebuilt my data file and reloaded prices. I had forgotten that I had done this. I guess if I hadn't done this then the existing prices would not have been overlaid. But still, it doesn't change the fact that the Historical Prices are "split" prices which doesn't really work with how Quicken does splits.
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I think this is larger systematic problem. Your first graph shows spikes which looks like the split adjusted prices is incorrect approximately one day per week. Others have reported this occurring for Friday prices. For me, this error appeared suddenly about two weeks ago, and I had not done anything unusual.
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