Purchasing USD Securities In CAD Investment Account

MoMoney99

Up until now, to deal with securities that trade on both Canadian and U.S markets, I have two separate investment accounts setup in Quicken, one in Canadian dollars and one in USD.

The issue I’m having is that the actual physical investment account held with my brokerage firm is all in Canadian dollars. Inside that account, I can buy both Canadian and U.S securities and there’s a FX swap at the time of each trade when purchasing/selling a USD security. In other words, all trades settle in CAD and the account balance is reported in CAD.

To deal with this in quicken, I’ve been using two separate accounts (1 - CAD, 1 - USD) where I do manual transfers from my CAD to USD account and vice versa any time a U.S security is traded. It's extremely cumbersome. I remember back in the old days, Quicken used to allow just one investment account supporting multiple currencies.

Is there a better way of doing this all within one investment account and simply entering a FX transaction to deal with this instead of doing transfers back and forth? I ask because doing all these transfers really screws up my investment reports in quicken.

Also, I noticed that Simplifi is now available in Canada. Does it have any better support for this type of investment tracking?

Any ideas and/or suggestions would be appreciated.

Chris_QPW

I remember back in the old days, Quicken used to allow just one investment account supporting multiple currencies.

Your memory is faulty. Quicken has never allowed this.

Also, I noticed that Simplifi is now available in Canada. Does it have any better support for this type of investment tracking?

You would need to ask that question on the Simplifi forum, almost no one here uses Simplifi.

https://community.simplifimoney.com/

MoMoney99

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/comment/20405295#Comment_20405295

I'm almost positive it did. I'm referring to the Windows version of Quicken many many years ago. We would be able to enter the FX rate in the transaction line of that investment account.

Chris_QPW

I think misinterpreted what you said and for sure I'm use to the US version and not the Canadian "way back when", even though I do have a Canadian data file today.

What I know can't be possible is mixed currencies in the same account. If on the other hand you buy a US security but all the recording of the cash for it is done in CAD, then sure I can see how that might be possible (in a CAD account). If this changed over the years, I have no idea when it changed that now you can't buy a US security in CAD (with exchange rate).