Historical performance with limited data

Question

I'm a new subscriber to Quicken Classic for Mac but I've had some of my investments for several years. My (Canadian) institution (Worldsource) doesn't seem to be supported for live connection. I've entered my current holdings and live balance but I'd like to have historical info; however Worldsource doesn't have a way to export to Quicken, only to spreadsheets. What is the best way to get a picture of historical performance. The accounts were opened in 2017/2018 so it's a lot to enter manually if I need to enter every buy and dividend reinvestment manually. If I put the buy date of my current holdings to when I opened the account, will that give me a rough idea of performance? Or any other ways around this?

thanks!

jacobs · Answer

I think you're looking for Quicken to do the impossible: show your investment performance without the underlying data. Dividends and reinvestments are an important part of the performance of your holdings.

If you're just looking for the change in the value of your holdings over time, you can go to any website, such as Yahoo finance, to see how a particular stock/mutal fund/ETF has performed over time. Or, as you suggested, if you enter your current share holdings as of 6-7 years ago, Qucien will download the historical stock prices to show you how the price has changed over time. But that's not really the same as seeing your performance over time. And Quicken won't ever be able to correctly show your gains (realized or unrealized).

If you have or can download your year-end brokerage statements, you might want to consider a project to enter some of the data without entering every transaction. For each security, you could add up your buys, your reinvestments, your dividends received, and enter one transaction for each on 12/31 of each year. This isn't perfect, but it at least captures what you spent versus dividends which increased your holdings.

Mark1104 · Answer

"performance" is a function of cash flow - so it's important to reflect the actual dates the cash was invested (the buys, including dividend reinvestments - which are just "buys") and the actual dates the cash was removed from the investment (the sells, including the dividends)… you can get "weird" results of you just enter the current holdings as purchased 6 years ago.