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Bonds

Kim Hedrick

After buying a number of bonds and manually adding the purchases as Bonds Bought in the Transaction window Quicken is showing the Market Value of the bonds using the price of the company's stock and not the bond price. Is this a bug in Quicken or did I do something incorrectly? I followed the instructions at "How Do I Buy A Bond" on the Quicken Support page

As an example Bank of America bonds were purchased so under Security Name I chose BAC for Bank Of America. Is there a different name that should be used? Even if I download the info from Wells Fargo Advisors and open in Quicken in the Portfolio View it shows the stock price for the company stock and not the price for the bonds.

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Accepted answers

q_lurker

Frankly, I think doing a lot of things manually in Quicken is a great way to understand what is really going on.

Should I just delete all the bond purchases I added manually and do a download from Wells to Quicken?

You originally wrote:

Even if I download the info from Wells Fargo Advisors and open in Quicken in the Portfolio View it shows the stock price for the company stock and not the price for the bonds.

That suggests you have downloaded these transactions from Wells Fargo once already. Whether they matched to your manual entries, or you deleted the downloaded transactions doesn't really matter. Once you have downloaded those transactions, they won't download again. So the delete and download probably will not advance your situation. If the only problem you are having is with the pricing, I don't think you need to delete the existing transactions.

I do suggest changing the name of the security to something bond related. You can do that through the Edit Details of the security detail view.

It is not clear to me where the BAC stock price that is being applied to the bond is coming from.

In the Security List (ctrl-y), next to the bond security, is the Download Quotes box checked? Of so, you should uncheck it.
Does the Bond Security in your file have BAC shown as the ticker? If so, you should delete it, or otherwise make it very unique. (See below)
From the security details for the bond, click the Edit Details button. Is the "Matched with Online Security" box checked. If so, uncheck it.

CHANGING A TICKER ON A BOND

Quicken does not make it easy to create or edit a ticker when the Security Type = Bond. To do so you must work through the Edit Details screen for the security.

Change the Security Type from Bond to anything else (Stock, for example)
You can now access and edit the ticker field. A rational string to use is the CUSIP associated with the bond, but blank is OK also.
When you make the change Quicken will prompt you about
- Copying the prices from old to new. Defaults to Yes. Usually Yes is good.
- Deleting the prices associated with the old ticker. Defaults to No. That is frequently adequate. There may be cases where you do want delete the prices associated with the old ticker, such as if you are just making a cosmetic change to the ticker.
Now you can change the Security Type back to Bond. Any bond related fields (Municipal, maturity dates, etc.) should return to view.

All comments

q_lurker

As an example Bank of America bonds were purchased so under Security Name I chose BAC for Bank Of America. Is there a different name that should be used?

Yes, you should do something differently. The Bond should have a unique name distinct from the stock of the same company. I like to include interest rate and maturity date (perhaps just year, such as BAC 5.025% 25/03/15 or BAC 5.025% 2025. You should not have the company stock ticker assigned to the Bond. When you get a download from your Wells Fargo account, you should make sure what Wells Fargo identifies as the bond is matched to your Quicken version of that Bond.

Kim Hedrick

As I mentioned in my original question, when I bought the Bank of America bonds the transaction window asked for the security name so that's why I chose BAC. Should I just delete all the bond purchases I added manually and do a download from Wells to Quicken? Just did a download from Wells in Excel form so I could read it without using Quicken. It doesn't show a Symbol for the bonds but it does have the CUSIP for each one. Any way to get that number in Quicken to differentiate between the Stock and the Bond? I'm a complete beginner with bond purchases, also with downloading from Wells. I've always done it manually even though I've used Quicken for decades.

q_lurker

Frankly, I think doing a lot of things manually in Quicken is a great way to understand what is really going on.

Should I just delete all the bond purchases I added manually and do a download from Wells to Quicken?

You originally wrote:

Even if I download the info from Wells Fargo Advisors and open in Quicken in the Portfolio View it shows the stock price for the company stock and not the price for the bonds.

I do suggest changing the name of the security to something bond related. You can do that through the Edit Details of the security detail view.

It is not clear to me where the BAC stock price that is being applied to the bond is coming from.

In the Security List (ctrl-y), next to the bond security, is the Download Quotes box checked? Of so, you should uncheck it.
Does the Bond Security in your file have BAC shown as the ticker? If so, you should delete it, or otherwise make it very unique. (See below)
From the security details for the bond, click the Edit Details button. Is the "Matched with Online Security" box checked. If so, uncheck it.

CHANGING A TICKER ON A BOND

Quicken does not make it easy to create or edit a ticker when the Security Type = Bond. To do so you must work through the Edit Details screen for the security.

Change the Security Type from Bond to anything else (Stock, for example)
You can now access and edit the ticker field. A rational string to use is the CUSIP associated with the bond, but blank is OK also.
When you make the change Quicken will prompt you about
- Copying the prices from old to new. Defaults to Yes. Usually Yes is good.
- Deleting the prices associated with the old ticker. Defaults to No. That is frequently adequate. There may be cases where you do want delete the prices associated with the old ticker, such as if you are just making a cosmetic change to the ticker.
Now you can change the Security Type back to Bond. Any bond related fields (Municipal, maturity dates, etc.) should return to view.

Kim Hedrick

I tried a few of the things you suggested with varying degrees of success. In the end I did go back and delete all the transactions. After adding them all back, I was still getting bad market value numbers and prices for them all. I clicked on Tools and then Online Center and clicked Update/Send which connected to Wells Fargo Advisors. It shows all 11 bond transactions with their CUSIP numbers under Description and Ticker with prices and market values current to 10/20 so I'm thinking, Great!, it's fixed. When I click Compare To Portfolio it tells me Your Quicken account and your Brokerage Holdings are in agreement. When I go to the Investing tab and show the Portfolio view all the bond prices are correct except for Bank of America. No matter what I try I can't get it to show the correct price and market value. It's still somehow tied the the stock price.

Kim Hedrick

I did a download from Wells Fargo Advisors yesterday and again this morning and opened them with Quicken and I now have correct prices and market values for all 11 bonds. Neither updating quotes or one step update from the Update dropdown on the Investing tab make any changes . Doing a download each day to get correct information is not that difficult so I guess that's what I'll need to do. Thanks for trying to help, you got me thinking which led to an eventual solution.

q_lurker

Glad you got it worked out.

The Download Quotes does not apply to bond pricing. I believe the only way to download prices for bonds is through a download from (update from) your financial. My understanding is that a financial institution only provides prices for one day at a time. For bonds, I would expect that to be the last trading date rather than any intra-day trading values.

Jim_Harman

And just to be clear, to avoid bogus price downloads from Quicken's quote provider, be sure to un-check the Download Quotes box for all the bonds in your Security List.

Kim Hedrick

Good idea!