Securities not showing in Portfolio view

Question

I just bought shares in a money market fund, but the fund does not appear in the Portfolio view; in fact, the value that I invested is subtracted from the total value of the account. Doing a search through the forums, I find that problems like this have occurred in the past and users are advised, for example, to confirm that the security appears in the Securities list. None of this advice has helped. When I pull up a Report listing the transactions, the transaction appears there, but with the wrong date (1/11/23 instead of 1/11/24) and still does, even when I re-enter the date. So it certainly looks like a peculiar bug in Quicken.

gmusser · Answer

OK, that helps - it explains why the download did not include this transaction or security. But why does the security still not appear in the portfolio even after I enter the transaction manually?

jacobs · Answer

If your account is connected to Schwab for downloading, Schwab doesn't allow you to treat the money market fund as a security; in its downloads to Quicken, Schwab treats SWVXX and SWGXX as cash. (This was a Schwab decision about two years ago, not Quicken's.)

To my knowledge, there are only two alternatives:

(1) Accept that "Cash" in your Schwab account in Quicken will be the sum of your SWVXX holdings plus any actual cash in the account. Moves of money into or out of SWVXX will not show up as Buy or Sell transactions, and in Quicken you won't see SWVXX among your securities held.

(2) If you don't connect your Schwab account for downloading, and ever your transactions manually, then you can treat SWVXX as a security in which there are Buy and Sell transactions.

Most people accept #1, albeit reluctantly. Some people, like me, enter transactions manually and do #2, and it works fine.

Although I should note that #2 means that you're basically giving yourself more work to enter the Buy and Sell transactions for SWVXX when you buy or sell other securities using or generating cash. For instance, if you buy shares of Apple stock using money you have in the money market fund, you have to record the sale of SWVXX shares, generating cash, before entering the purchase of Apple, using cash. If you just leave your SWVXX holdings as cash at all times, you don't need to enter those extra SWVXX transactions. But to to reconcile your Quicken to your Schwab statement, you need to manually add the Cash and SWVXX values from the statement to compare to the single Cash value in Quicken. So… damned if you do, damned if you don't! 😂

This was Quicken's original post about the change in February 2022:

https://community.quicken.com/discussion/7907735/swvxx-value-advantage-money-market-fund-and-swgxx-schwab-government-money-fund

gmusser · Answer

Schwab, but in any case, the problem still occurs even if I enter the transaction manually, and the amount is not included in the cash balance of the account. In the Securities list, the fund does not show as “Currently held.”