Portfolio view historical valuation of CD's is zero

ljpwright

I am a newer Quicken Mac user. My investment information has been flowing from Schwab and all seems good regarding current valuation and past transaction information. If I look at the value of my Portfolio a year ago that value seems to reflect the cash balance and other securities, but not CD's. That is, for a CD that had value one year ago and doesn't today since it has matured, shows as zero value in the Portfolio view both when viewed as of todays date with a one-year time horizon, or viewed as of one year ago.

I did not make any changes to the downloaded transactions. Should I have? Some change I have to make?

jacobs

The data included in the historical Portfolio can be a little funky to control. If you mark accounts Hidden, as you might reasonably do with old accounts, the data disappears from the Portfolio (chart and tables). If you mark those accounts as Closed but NOT Hidden, the historical data will remain in the Portfolio chart and the Portfolio table when the As Of date is set in the past. For this reason, I no longer mark any of my old investment accounts as Hidden.

But you typically don't want your left sidebar cluttered with these old accounts; that's why you'd think to hide them. The trick is to close them but not hide them, then go to Settings > Sidebar and set the sidebar Accounts to Display to NOT show Closed accounts.

@ljpwright I don't know how your CDs were recorded in Quicken. Was each one a separate investment account? If so, check to see if they are now hidden, and if so, follow the instructions above to mark them a Closed but not Hidden. If the CDs were individual securities within one account, then you can ignore what I've written here, as there must be a different issue!

So how was the CD recorded when you purchased it? I don't know what (if anything) downloads from Schwab for CDs in a brokerage account. Was each CD created as a separate security, which was bought and then sold? When I create a CD that way, I still see the past value in the Portfolio chart, or the table with a prior As Of date.

Here's a simple example. I created a manual account, transferred $100,000 into the account on 1/1/23, and bought a CD security on 1/1/23 for $100,000. On 12/31/23, I recorded a $5,000 interest payment and sold the CD, resulting in $105,000 in cash in the account. On 1/1/24, I transferred the $105,000 to another account. Here's the Portfolio view which shows this, with the As of Date set to today:

ljpwright

Thanks Jacobs…sounds like you know a good bit here, enough to ask the right questions. Yes, these CDs were purchased as individual items within an account that is neither hidden nor closed. The CD's came into Quicken as a "bond" with type "other bond" rather than coming in as a CD as I might expect.

jacobs

@ljpwright Okay, so let's follow the path of those CDs in the account.

• Was there cash in the investment account prior to the CD purchases?
• Were the CD purchases recorded as Type=Buy transactions, using up cash in the account?
• When the CDs matured, were they recorded as Type=Sell transactions, creating cash in the account?

Here's an test case:

• I created a Test CD account to show a simplified example.
• I transferred $100,000 into the account from my checking account on 1/1/23. This cash is needed to purchase the bonds (CDs). You might have cash in your existing brokerage account from other activities including the sales of other holdings, but it needs to be showing more than the purchase price of the CDs on or before the purchase date.
• On the maturity date of 12/31/23, I recorded a payment of $5,000 interest, and the Sale of the $100,000 of "Bonds".
• I then transferred the resulting $105,000 to my checking account. This is just to illustrate that the value of the account is now zero but was not zero last year.

So here are those transactions in the register:

And here is the portfolio graph showing the value of the investment while it existed.

Here is the Portfolio with the As Of date set back to 10/31/23 while the CD/"Bond" was still held:

Notice the table below the chart shows the CD security and its value on the As Of date of 10/31/23.

I'm not sure how your downloads from Schwab differed from this example, particularly for the payment of interest of the CD, but I'm hoping this sample might lead you to see which transaction(s) may have been recorded incorrectly.

ljpwright

You've provided some insight to places to look. These transaction are "buy bonds", followed by "payment/deposit" at maturity. When the "bond" is purchased there is an appropriate positive "invest amt" that is added to offset the cash spent, but there is not a debit to that "invest amt" when the cash comes back as a "payment/deposit" type of transaction. If I change the maturity transaction to be "sell bond", and put in the requisite security detail with 9 digit code (not sure this is required), it does show as negative "invest amt" to offset the returning cash.

It gets me wondering if Quicken zeros out the bond's investment value if it reaches maturity and never has a book-end sell transaction to balance the original buy transaction. I have changed a few of them but it does not seem that Quicken is making any changes in the Portfolio amount.

Have you seen the past portfolio value change based on changing of past transactions?