Can not add any more securities to security list

Question

Quicken R51.10 on Windows

Quicken will not let me add new securities to the security list manually.

It may only be for options; not sure yet for reasons explained below.

First a bit of background…

I have always had problems with Quicken and Fidelity when it comes to options.

I have resorted to inserting the options manually when it is coming from Fidelity. After numerous discussions with Fidelity and Quicken, I resorted to manually creating the security when it is coming from Fidelity because it seemed to me there was no other solution. I've been successfully doing this for about a year and everything was working fine until a few days ago.

Quicken will not add the option info to the security list  when I am adding it manually anymore. I can add it via the 'Add Security' button, but it never shows up in the security list.

I performed a 'Validate and Repair', it found some errors which I fixed, but it is still not inserting the added securities into the security list.

When they are downloaded from my Interactive Brokers account it is working fine. So, it seemed to me it wasn't a problem with the security list being too big, but just in case I went into the security list and hid a large number of expired options, but it didn't make any difference.

By the way, is there any way to just delete these expired option entries in that list? Seems a waste to carry all that baggage around in that security list. I trade options much more than I trade the underlying. I am over a thousand options trades this year alone. This file has to be getting huge. I started using quicken around 2010 or so. I started trading options heavily around 2015. I wouldn't be surprised if there are around 10,000 options which are expired in there.

I don't know if it is only occurring only for the options. I have not had any stock (which is not in my security list already) trades in my Fidelity account lately; until I do I won't know if the same problem is occurring for common stock.

Ps56k2 · Answer

here is a sample of the Ctrl+Right Click …. About Quicken

what does your stats look like ?

Boatnmaniac · Answer

I have most commonly seen the issue of a security not getting added tied to the user trying to create one where the security name or the ticker already existed in the security list. IIRC, it is the first 16 or 32 characters of the security name that needs to be unique.

To expand upon this a bit:  Stock tickers sometimes do get recycled.  I've had a few stocks over the years where the company was merged, split, went private or was liquidated so the stock/ticker was delisted.  Then a while later the tickers suddenly showed up, again, associated with some other company.

So if you are trying to get a security added to security list and Quicken is preventing you from doing that, check to see if the name or ticker was previously used with a different security.  If you, you could try to resolve it by changing the name or deleting the ticker of the earlier security.

q_lurker · Answer

I have most commonly seen the issue of a security not getting added tied to the user trying to create one where the security name or the ticker already existed in the security list.  IIRC, it is the first 16 or 32 characters of the security name that needs to be unique.

I suggest you go to the Help pull down menu and ctrl-right-click  on About Quicken.  That will give you a real number of securities in your file.  If the 'Max ref is very different, that could indicate a problem which Validate should have repaired.  In that case, a call to Quicken Support would be my next step.

The 2000 limit reference @Boatnmaniac pointed to has been there a long time with no clarification as to what 'trackable' means.  The number has been referred to as a soft limit problems more likely rather than an immediate breakdown when the level is exceeded.  Multiple users have reported going beyond the 2000 level.

Nevertheless, if you are "trading options heavily" and dealing with something like 10,000 securities, you are outside the demographics of Quicken.  I'd suggest you look at other software possibilities.  I have no guidance in that direction.