How to correct bad price history data?

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RobertPila
RobertPila Member ✭✭
edited January 7 in Investing (Windows)

Every once in a while, Quicken has bad history data for a symbol. For example, the price history for the symbol PG is wrong for the 2023-12-04. The actual close price is 152.06 according to TD Ameritrade, but Quicken has 146.76, which is the close price for 2023-12-05. And there is entry for 2023-12-03, which is a Sunday, so there shouldn't be one. The price eventually corrects itself, but it throws off the gain/loss in the portfolio for that day. Included is a screen shot of the price history for PG. I've seen this happen for other symbols as well, both company stocks and ETFs. How can this be corrected without manually fixing it? I have tried running Update History but that did not fix the prices.

Answers

  • jacobs
    jacobs SuperUser, Mac Beta Beta
    edited December 2023
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    Quicken downloads prices from a third-party data supplier, and as you note, those prices are occasionally off. Sometime, they get corrected by the data supplier, and those corrections flow into Quicken. So if the data downloaded into Quicken is incorrect, you simply make a manual correction of the price.

    You asked "How can this be corrected without manually fixing it?" Well, if it isn't automatically fixed by the data supplier, then manually fixing it is the alternative; I'm not sure what third option you think there might be. 😉

    Fixing a price on a specific date is fast and easy. You posted this under Quicken Mac, but your screenshot shows you are using Quicken Windows, so I don't want to state how to do it. A price can be edited in the security's price history screen, like the one you have shown, by selecting a date and either editing the price value (you can ignore High, Low and Volume) — or deleting the price for a day if it's an inconsequential day (e.g. not a month-end, or date of a transaction). (In Quicken Mac, one can also edit a price on a specific day in the Portfolio view.)

    If there are long string of days with incorrect prices — which is rare — you can look for another source of price data for the security (such as finance.yahoo.com), download the date range as a .csv file, and import the data into Quicken.

    Quicken Mac Subscription • Quicken user since 1993
  • RobertPila
    RobertPila Member ✭✭
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    Thanks for the info. I didn't know about importing price history data. Also, something weird in that I had closed my Quicken file with the bad data, but when I re-opened it and did an account update, I checked the price history data for PG and it is now correct for 2023-12-04. There is still an entry for 2023-12-03, but at least the 4th is correct. This makes me think it MIGHT NOT be a problem with the 3rd party supplier. I will admit I have a very very large Quicken file that goes back over 20 years. That might have something to do with it.

  • q_lurker
    q_lurker SuperUser ✭✭✭✭✭
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    @RobertPila Not a file size problem. It is a problem with the data supplier. See this discussion:

    Be aware, with respect to downloading older prices from sources such as Yahoo Finance and then a csv file import, that historical prices from such sources are (always?) adjusted for stock splits, spinoffs, and such events. In Quicken records, one usually does not want that adjusted data because there are (or may be) transactions that effectively make those adjustments.

  • RobertPila
    RobertPila Member ✭✭
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    Thanks for mentioning that thread. It very much does seem like my problem.

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