Sorting 'same day transactions by security name' should group options with their underlying stock

veegee

Say I have transactions on stocks AAA and BBB, and also have call/puts options on AAA and BBB.

When the setting 'Sort same-day transactions by security name' is enabled, Quick will sort as follows:

AAA, BBB, CALL AAA, CALL BBB, PUT AAA, PUT BBB

But the calls/puts should be grouped with their underlying stock symbol, like the following:

AAA, CALL AAA, PUT AAA, BBB, CALL BBB, PUT BBB

Thanks.

Quicken Anja

Hello @veegee,

I went ahead and changed your post to an Idea so other users who have the same or a similar request can vote on your idea by clicking the up arrow (see below).

Ideas are also reviewed by our Development and Product teams in order to improve Quicken and implement new features requested by customers.

Thank you!

veegee

Thank you, Quicken Anja!

veegee

Thank you, @Quicken Anja

Quicken Anja

You’re welcome!

NotACPA

@veegee It's a straight alpha sort. How can you possibly "AAA" and "Call AAA" to be grouped together?

BUT, you can change the name of the Call (it doesn't have to match what the broker reports) to "AAA Call" which would seem to do what you want.

veegee

Oh, I understand that it is a straight alpha sort - and the idea is to improve that. A simple filter that, during sorting only, will cut out the 'CALL ' and 'PUT ' prefixes before/during the sort should be sufficient.

Changing the name of the call myself - I will need to be doing this 5 or 8 times a day each day. That is what computers are for, is it not - helping us do mundane tasks much faster with less human error.

NotACPA

I'd vote AGAINST this. It appears to be a lot of work to provide a trivial benefit.

veegee

@NotACPA , it is a trivial software implementation. (I have 30+ years of software development experience.) And there are tons of people who do stock 'buy/write's - where they buy a stock and sell a corresponding call all in one combined transaction - but one which gets reported as two separate transactions.

NotACPA

[Removed - Argumentative]

veegee

[Removed - Argumentative]

veegee

@Quicken Anja , I signed up for the email digest per your suggestion.

Jim_Harman

@veegee This is a little off topic, but are you really creating 5-8 new securities per day?

If so, it would be interesting to know how many securities are currently defined in your Quicken file, and if you run into issues related to the security count.

You can find this number by clicking on Help and then doing Shift-About Quicken. The specs say it can handle 2,000 "trackable" securities, whatever that means, but it appears that some users have more than that without serious issues.

Thanks for checking.

veegee

Hi @Jim_Harman : To be technical, I don't create the securities (the get created at the options exchanges - which I am sure you know). They get added to Quicken as I trade them (which I am sure you know as well).

Probably hundreds of thousands of options exist (guess) at any given time. Thousands get created by Wall Street every week and thousands expire each week and are no longer tradeable. There must tens of thousands of different options, because there are thousands of stocks, and on most of them there are many tens of weekly options for every week, at many tens of strike prices. Multiply out the combinations.

I did the shift-About Quicken thing - I see 'Securities/Max ref: 5637/5637'. Transactions: 111116.

Jim_Harman

Thanks, it is good to know that Quicken can handle that many securities. Because the options expire, I suppose you don't hold nearly that many at any one time.

Do you experience sluggish performance in Quicken? With that many transactions one or a few accounts I would expect very slow performance.

Are you able to get quotes for the options from Quicken's quote provider, or only when you update transactions, in which case the quotes come from your broker? If from the quote provider, what is the format of the ticker symbols? I ask because many users have complained that they can't get option quotes from the quote provider.

Thanks again for your info.

veegee

Yes, I don't hold that many options at one time - usually about 4 to 12 at any time. And they vary day-to-day, even within the same day. Quite often I have multiple options on the same underlying stock. Both short and long.

Yes, very sluggish, due to the number of transactions. Looks to me like Quicken does a 'brute force' re-calculation over all the transactions in the account multiple times (probably for safety). (And it still gets the holdings wrong quite often resulting in Security comparison mismatches. Generally I ignore the Security comparison mismatch errors reported by Quicken.) The actual Holdings (shown by clicking the 'Holdings' button) are correct.)

I don't look at quotes from Quicken usually. I would say at the end of the day it matches well with my broker, especially on stock. On options I have much less confidence. Quite often it is right and quite often it is wrong.

Quicken quotes, as far as I can tell, are downloaded when I download transactions. Not looked into this too closely.

One other major nuisance is that transactions data is not current. Quicken (or its aggregator Intuit) seems to limit how often transactions are actually updated from my broker (Schwab). Usually I can get updates only 2 or 3 times a day. I do not think this limitation is coming from Schwab itself - I have had discussions with them on this. This limitation happened after Schwab/Quicken switched to the latest (EWC+?) download data transfer method.

I am fairly confident that Quicken's quotes are NOT coming from my broker.

Hope that helps.

markb1

Would be helpful to be able to include on Investing View, the current stock price of an underlying security the subcategory of Options or Calls

Rocket J Squirrel

I think this idea makes sense. To me, 'Sort same-day transactions by security name' is a nonsensical option. But for daily options traders (who are already pushing QWin beyond its limits), it would be advantageous to group the options and the underlyings together.